Last week we ran the first Oxford Human Rights Hub Feedback Survey – designed to find our more about how you think we are doing, and what else we could do to support and connect practitioners, policy makers and academics working toward the understanding and advancement of human rights law around the globe.

We were thrilled with the result.  A very big thank you to everyone who participated.  We were particularly pleased to have feedback from participants based in 26 different countries – from Japan to Argentina, to Slovenia, Zimbabwe Sweden, Namibia and beyond!  More than half of the survey participants were based outside of England, demonstrating that Oxford serves as the hub for a truly global network.

Here is a quick snap shot of some of the results:

• More than half of the respondents visited our website more than once a week.  We strive to provide new blogs, news and updates on a daily basis, so we are glad that you visit our site often!
• 96.6% of respondents were happy with the frequency of our blog posts (almost daily) and encouragingly, 95.5% are satisfied with the quality of the posts on the OxHRH Blog.  We really can’t take all the credit for this high praise– we source the content for our blog from you, our dear participants.  Your willingness to volunteer your time and energy to write for us is what keeps the blog content fresh, engaging and at a high scholarly level.  So thank you!  If you haven’t yet had a chance to write for the blog, but would be interested in writing, please visit the ‘How to Contribute’ tab on the OxHRH Blog homepage.
• We realize that human rights practitioners, policy makers and academics are busy people, so we try to keep our blogs short and pithy (between 500 and 700 words) to be easily digestible in your busy day.  91% of our survey participants were very happy with the length of our posts.
• You had some great ideas for new topics for posts, including more on indigenous rights, education and youth, corporate social responsibility, human rights and the environment, remedies in human rights cases, governance and the design of democratic institutions, parliamentary human rights process, religion (particularly Islam) and human rights, and many more great ideas!  We will do our best to source posts on this, but once again, if you would like to write for us please be in touch!
• A few of the respondents also noted that while we strive to cover a broad global spread of human rights law issues, there are some jurisdictions upon which we have been more quiet than others.  In particular, if you would like to write on human rights law developments in Latin America, South East Asia, Eastern Europe or Western, Central and Eastern Africa, or the United States, do drop us a line.
• The responses indicate that you are generally a very social media savvy bunch!  71.8% of respondents follow the OxHRH on either Flickr, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  Facebook was the most popular social media forum (39.3%) closely followed by Twitter (24.7%).  You generally like to use social media to stay up to date with the latest OxHRH Blog posts, as well as finding out more about our latest OxHRH Events.  A few of you asked that we include an opt-in email notification function – to alert you immediately when a new post goes live.  We hope to be able to introduce this very soon!
• We were very happy to hear that you enjoy reading our fortnightly newsletter.  It only takes a moment to sign up by completing this form, so please do connect!
• Being a hub based in Oxford, we understand that it can be very difficult for many of you to attend our events in person. Just under half of the respondents had been able to make one of our seminars or conferences.  However, did you know that free podcasts of most events are available on our website?  You can also subscribe to the OxHRH on ITunesU and be sure never to miss a word!  We were also encouraged that 83.4% of participants would be interested in following out seminars and conferences via live streaming or participating in a webinar.  We are looking into launching this early next academic year – so stayed tuned!
• Finally, we had some great feedback on the look and feel of our website.  We are sorry to hear that some people find it difficult to navigate.  But once again, we are on the case and we hope to have improvements very soon!

Thank you once again to everyone who took the time to reply to our feedback survey.  You have spoken and we have listened!  We hope to present you with some new improvements, based on this feedback very soon.

We would also like to thank our fantastic supporters at Hart Publishing.  The lucky winners of the book draw were Natasha Holcroft-Emmess from England winning a copy of Rights and Court in Pursuit of Social Change edited by Dia Anagnostou; Dr Anup Surendranath of India winning a copy of The Liberty of Non-Citizens by Rayner Thwaites and Edita Turičnik of Slovenia winning a copy of Human Rights and Public Finance, edited by Aoife Nolan, Rory O’Connell and Colin Harvey.

If you missed out on the survey but have some ideas on how we can improve what we do here, why not leave us a comment below (remembering our comments policy please!) or send an email to oxfordhumanrightshub@law.ox.ac.uk.