IMPOWER’s greatest hits 2015

IMPOWER spend a lot of time collecting and analysing our clients’ data to unearth insights, reach conclusions and redesign services. It’s also important to practice what we preach and look at our own data to better understand and serve our clients and audiences.

So when looking at our blog stats for 2015, I wondered whether the stats would be a reflection of public services in 2015. Here is what I found:

IMPOWER’s top blogs of 2015

1. Social Care Precept: Winners and losers (November 2015)
2. How to build an insight hub (April 2015)
3. Child and Adolescent Mental Health: A thought with the ‘future in mind’ (May 2015)
4. How big is your impact? (August 2015)
5. Language: It can bring you together or set you apart (March 2015)

Social Care Precept: Winners and losers packed a punch given that it has only been live for a matter of weeks, but coverage of the blog in the Independent and trade press moved it swiftly up the league table. If you take in to account blogs announcing reports, then ‘Breaking the lock report released today’ would secure the number one spot by some way.

What does this tell us?

• The public sector likes practical, useful stuff. There is a high degree of utility in the most popular posts: a new model for children’s services, social care data, our ideas on how to make the most of council data and insight. Blue sky thinking has its place, but 2015 (and I imagine 2016 also) is the year of the how rather than the what.
• The sector is spinning many plates right now. There is no one dominant theme; the sector is trying to get its head around how to integrate and transform services across the spectrum from adult social care to children’s services, from organisational re-design to health.
• Blogs on current affairs get the hits (Social Care Precept, How Big is Your Impact?) but there are other challenges facing the public services that are bigger than the news cycle. Our Breaking the Lock report was launched in April and is our 7^th most visited web page this year. High quality, genuinely useful thought leadership is still needed in the sector right now.

In total, IMPOWER have written almost 70 blogs in 2015, sharing insights from our projects, reflecting on current affairs and developing ideas and concepts. It’s in the DNA of our business to be open and share what we learn. Here’s to continuing that in 2016.

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