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LMP Blog performance October 2019 – June 2021

It seems like only yesterday when we published a puff piece about the reach and impact of the LMP Blog. Turns out, the last one was in September 2019, so we’ve a bit of catching up to do.

TL;DR

The popularity of the LMP Blog continues to increase, and users are looking at more content for longer.

In the last 12 months (Apr20-Mar21)

  • The number of people who subscribe to weekly LMP mailings has increased by more than 15% -from 494 to 579
  • Unique users of the LMP Blog have grown by about 25% 
  • The number of sessions has also increased by 25%
  • Over the last year, people have looked at 30% more pages than they did in 2021
  • Posts: we’ve averaged about 29 posts a month

These numbers are an underestimate

In July 2020, The LMP Blog servers went down, and we lost all posts from March 2020 until the last week in July. Of the 100 articles we lost, we recovered/reposted 3 of them.

Who looks after the Blog??

The blog is maintained by the LMP Comms team: Richard and Jasmine at Refugee Council, with help from Ally at PAFRAS and Jon at LASSN. The Comms team have had particular help from Georgia (formerly of PATH and RETAS), Mary at Asylum Matters, with regular updates from Jenny and Sam and other colleagues at the Council.

Who pays for this?

If 348 blogs are published each year (and each one takes a total of 15 minutes to write, upload, edit and publish) then this amounts to an annual contribution of 87 hours unpaid labour. Paid at the real living wage (£9.50/hr), this amounts to an in-kind contribution of at least £825.

LASSN maintain the LMP Blog as part of its contribution to the sector – this costs LASSN about £175 for hosting and £350 for security – so about £550 a year.

In January 2019, Leeds City Council’s Communities Team generously awarded £200 towards these running costs, after granting £250 development costs in 2018.

Why all that security?

We’ve blogged about this before, at length (funnily enough, just after we got the last bill). The good news is that attacks have fallen by 90% since February 2020. It’s kind of sad that the worst thing that’s befallen the LMP Blog (the data loss) was not the work of a hostile actor, but our own servers. Maybe we need to spend more on server-backups instead.

How things are in July 2021

How things were in February 2020

Anyway, that’s it for now.

Thank you to everyone who uploads, shares and reads this stuff. And for the people who help pay the bills. It’s you that makes the LMP Blog what it is

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