In December last year we invited a range of our stakeholders, staff and students from across the University, to write ‘Letters to Santa‘, letting him – and us – know what they would like for a Digitally Ready Christmas and New Year. The rich and varied responses resulted in the following wish list:
- time to experiment with technology
- awareness of what systems and support are available
- advice about online reputation
- better communications
- training/opportunities to learn
- better connectivity between systems.
In keeping with the festive theme, a selection of these letters were published on the project blog and Pat Parslow, acting as Santa’s Communication Elf, responded.
Looking at our WordPress stats, a couple of weeks ago I noticed that ‘letters to Santa’ was one of the top 10 search terms resulting in visits to the Digitally Ready blog. Initially, I put this down to the time of year, wondering just what some of these people would make of our particular take on this.
But then I began to notice more specific searches for ‘JISC letters to Santa’ and even ‘Digitally Ready letters to Santa’. It seems that some of our visitors really were interested in our project and approach, as this morning we were approached by The Digital Department, our counterparts at University College London, who would like to do something similar with their stakeholders.
We’ve certainly found this approach useful in eliciting informative views from our project partners and getting them to focus on the issues that are close to their hearts. Here is our template – if anyone else out there would like to use it, please feel free.