It’s our birthday – what a year!

It’s been a year since we launched edpsy…and what a year it’s been!

Celebrations and giveaways

First thing’s first, we’re going to spend the next few weeks celebrating our birthday across social media and we want you to be involved to0. We have three ‘Five a day to keep you Joyful’ pocket books to give away. This inspirational little book focuses on 5-a-day for your mind to keep you joyful. All you have to do to win is sign up for email updates. Three winners will be chosen from new subscribers between now and the end of November.

Bringing EPs together…

…is the ‘tagline’ that is at the top of every page on the site and on every email we send but I think it’s more than a simple tag. Over the past year it’s become our vision. We set out to create a space where EPs from around the world, at whatever age and stage in their careers, could come together as a community to share, engage, debate and work together creatively.

As I’m writing this blog post I’m looking back at the contributions we’ve received from EPs since last September and it’s pretty humbling/astounding. It’s been a privilege to highlight some real innovative work within the profession, in areas where we are really pushing boundaries and leading the way. From challenging the touch taboo in schools and in care contexts to rethinking mental distress in children. Over the past year we’ve also seen a real increase in the number of EPs taking to twitter and highlighting the great work they are doing using the #adayinthelifeofan_EP.

We’ve also been able to engage with the wider EP community and there are a number of groups/organisations that have really supported our efforts – from contributing to sharing our posts on Twitter and Facebook. We’d especially like to thank:

• The British Psychological Society – for the retweets
• The DECP – for contributions and retweets
• ISPA (International School Psychology Association) – for sharing their work and conference with us
• TIGER (Teaching Individuals Gender Equality and Respect) – for their contribution to the site
• Educational Psychology Today – A Facebook community page that has really helped get word out about us
• Educational Psychology for Everyone – same as above!

Our achievements this year

Over the past 12 months we have had:

• 11,500 visitors to the site
• 41,500 page views! (not bad for a site with only 30-ish pages)
• Visitors to the site from 95 countries
• 37,500 impressions in twitter
• 2,000 engagements on facebook
• Promoted 47 events on our events calendar since November 2016
• Published 21 blog posts and features

What’s next?

For the year ahead we want to continue to bring our readers exciting, interesting and innovative content. Alongside improving what we already do we have a few exciting plans:

EPs overseas

We’re keen to hear about the experiences of EPs who work around the world. We know there are EPs from New Zealand to Canada (and everywhere in between), who are applying their skills in exciting ways and we want to provide a space for those EPs to share their reflections and experiences.

Cross profession/discipline collaboration

We work with a myriad of other professionals every day; teachers, SENCO’s, social workers, speech and language therapists, clinical psychologists to name but a few. This year we hope to be able to provide reflections and accounts of work done by these professionals to stimulate discussion about how we can best work together.

Going multi-media: podcasts and more…

So far all of our content has been in written format. From the stats above this approach hasn’t done us too badly. However, we know that most of you (58% to be exact) visit the site from your mobile or tablet which is why this year we’ll hopefully trial the introduction of our blogs and features as podcasts – so you can download and listen on the go.

A better events calendar experience

Our events calendar is a popular feature but we know that it can feel a bit cumbersome adding an event via the Google Form that we currently use. This year we’re hoping to upgrade the software behind the calendar which means you’ll be able to:

• Add an event straight on to the site
• Create and sell tickets to your events
• A better search experience

We’re going to have a great (if busy) year ahead and we’re looking forward to it. The above are our ideas for the site, but we’d also love to hear yours, just get in touch.

Best wishes,

Dan

 

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