Introduction

Throughout this book, our focus has been on creating a more proactive approach to what we do online. The rationale behind doing things this way is that although it requires some initial up front investment (mainly time, rather than cash!), it ultimately puts you and your institution into a much stronger position in the medium to long term.

The challenge with being more strategic is that you can almost become toostrategic! Flexibility with strategy is key. One of the hardest yet most vital functions when working online is to understand when strategy and policy should be updated, challenged and changed. This understanding will come through a number of avenues. As we've already seen in Chapter 2 ‘Building a strategic approach', for example, you should have regular strategy reviewswhere you take your strategy, critically evaluate it against any success criteria, and then use this review to amend and evolve your future plans.

Beyond the review, however, you also need the mechanics in place to allow people – users, staff and stakeholders – to provide you with ongoing feedback about what you're doing or any ideas that they think could improve this. Furthermore, you also need to make sure that you and anyone directly involved with the web at your institution are well informed

and up to date with the latest developments in your particular sector.

With this in mind, let's have a look at some ideas for gathering feedback and staying informed.

Ongoing feedback

You can keep the feedback and engagement process alive between your strategy reviews by providing and maintaining some kind of mechanism to receive feedback and ideas about the strategy and the progress of your web presence on an ongoing basis. Do this both with your web strategy team – have an Any Other Business (AOB) which you actively maintain between meetings – but also make sure you have an avenue for capturing and gathering feedback from the organization andthe outside audience.

There are a number of ways of doing this:

Ideas mailbox

Ask your IT team to set up a new mailbox which you and your team can get access to. This mailbox should be used for one purpose: to solicit feedback from internal and external people with ideas and suggestions for how you can improve your service.