One of the many useful suggestions that was made at the recent Physiopedia Hackathon in Liverpool was to run a simple survey on the Physiopedia website to discover exactly what the make up of the site users is. Since we started Physiopedia in 2009 we have been regularly asked who uses the site and how many of the site visitors are physiotherapists, other healthcare professionals and/or members of the public. Also we are asked how many of these visitors are students versus practising clinicians. Until now we didn’t have an informed answer to this question ( as Google Analytics does not gather any specifics about the website visitors). As a result of being prompted by our hackathon participants, now we do have a much clearer picture thanks to a very short anonymous survey we published for 48 hours on Physiopedia between Wed 16th Nov and Fri 18th Nov 2016. Over this short period this survey was displayed 32,000 times and was completed on 2,800 occasions, by site visitors from 120 different countries, which represents a staggering 8.8% completion rate! We are extremely grateful for all of you out there who took the few seconds it took to answer our 2 questions: What is your profession? How long have you been practising?
The main findings were that:
- Just over 70% of Physiopedia site users are physical therapists or physiotherapists.
- Only 9% of Physiopedia site users are non healthcare professionals.
Of the physiotherapists using the site:
- One third are students
- One third have 0-5 years experience of practice
- One third have 5+ years of experience of practice (with 20% have more than 10 years experience)
The majority of the survey responses came from the US, UK, Canada, India and Australia which matches the site use distribution we have observed on Google Analytics.
This distribution is likely to fluctuate slightly over the year as demand from students varies with the academic year, however this would seem to present a fairly typical picture. We are extremely excited by these findings as it shows not only are we reaching our target audience with the site, the use across the range of practice experience demonstrates that the site and its content is not just useful for students. It has also shown us just how amazing a group of users the Physiopedia site has who are happy to be distracted from their quest for knowledge for a moment to help us with this survey. I suspect we will be calling on these users again with other short simple surveys. Perhaps you could think of a question to ask this audience which could provide data to benefit the profession and its clients.