PUBLISHING ACTIVITY

ANALYSIS

Nearly all targets for publishing, media engagement and digital engagement were either met or exceeded. Aboriginal Studies Press total financial year sales and revenue exceeded targets, bolstered by marketing activity throughout the year. Updates to the AIATSIS and Ashop website have resulted in a vast increase in customer calls and emails. Online orders have increased on average by 40 per week (excluding email/ phone orders).

AIATSIS continues to strengthen its influence and presence in the education sectors. The schools sector has been the main focus for the past twelve months, culminating in the release of a set of whole-of-primary-school resources that link to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cross-curriculum priority. AIATSIS will continue to build its education profile and in 2019–20 will develop a schools program strategy that will inform the development of a physical and digital learning space.

The AIATSIS website continues to be the central communication channel for AIATSIS, with steady growth in traffic to just under 3 million site visits through the year, up 26 per cent from the previous year.

With the social media officer position vacant for a quarter of the 2018–19 financial year, social media activity and reach declined somewhat but, after a significant drop, it recovered towards the end of the year.

Media interest in AIATSIS remained steady, with interview requests on par with the previous year and requests for media content doubling. The team’s ability to reach journalists and monitor for mentions of AIATSIS has increased dramatically with the introduction of the Meltwater media monitoring and social media platform. Previously the team were manually building and managing a media contacts database and monitoring for mentions of AIATSIS through free online alert services and manual searching—not an effective use of time or resources. The new platform automates a number of processes and significantly increases AIATSIS’ ability to monitor media mentions and track other conversations of interest.

Meltwater has also greatly increased AIATSIS’ outreach capability, allowing for broader and more targeted distribution of media releases through the use of location, topic and beat filters. The number of mentions of AIATSIS in 2018–19 rose dramatically to 928, from 94 in 2017–18. This reflects an increase in the effectiveness of media outreach and AIATSIS’ improved monitoring capability.