Page 171 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015171newspaper’s jobs business. The aim was to bring together a community of culture professionals on the Guardian website and to create useful and independent conversations around arts careers, jobs and the workplace. This was to reinforce the idea that the Guardian and CPN were the place to go if you were looking for a new job or thinking about it.As one of the most respected and used arts jobs services in the UK, the Guardian’s arts careers offering didn’t require any major marketing push; CPN wasn’t brought to life to shout about roles and openings. Rather, we wanted to opena conversation up around careers in the sector: to educate graduates and freelance artists about what opportunities were available to them; to help existing employees do their job better; or to help them find a new role. These are all things the network still does today, but no longer exclusively.The first web content was very much employment oriented, intended as a support site for The Guardian Jobs.Early content launched on the site was therefore very career focused. Examples of articles include: 10 tips on writing a successful CV, How to be a happy freelance worker, as well a themed weekin November 2011 on internships, aimed at both employer and employee. With time, as the overall objectives of the Guardian changed, so too did those of CPN, which meant changes to the way we operated.Development of the networkIn the three years that followed its launch, CPN continued to iterate, innovate and improve. Some of these innovations were accidental, others were deliberate and required weeks or months of planning. Other innovations, like any small publisher, failed significantly, but we learned from those mistakes.Data and analysisIn the modern publishing age – where readers find and engage with content in such a variety of ways (and mostly online) – data is extremely important. For an online community suchas CPN, where you must continually ensure readers are being served relevant content in the right ways, data is vital.Audience and content data (much like the arts) can mean the difference between an incredible or abysmal month of traffic (footfall). Similarly, it can strongly affect the engagement and happiness of your readers (visitor experience). Most importantly, it can help to create content and experiences that will encourage readers to come back for more (return visits).Like any online community, we knew that we would not be able to intimately know every single individual member of our community which, as of 1 January 2015, stands at 20,000 signedup members and more than 120,000 monthly unique readers. Likewise, we under- stood that drawing a single CPN member in broad brush strokes was dangerous. Much like snowflakes, no two CPN readers are 100% theMatthew Caines