Research on development blogging reloaded-new survey on audience and impact

Who reads international aid and development blogs?
 
David Algoso had the brilliant idea to use the wisdom of the development blogging crowd and its esteemed readers to help us with empirical data on reading and sharing habits and the general 'use' of development blogs. 

So a number of bloggers (that's why you may see similar posts on more than one of your favourite blogs but they all lead to the same survey) have gotten together to create a joint survey of our readers: please take the survey here.

International aid and development blogs have expanded rapidly in the past few years, and our audience has expanded too. We want a better sense of just who is reading these blogs and what they're interested in. The survey will take just 5 minutes and will be available for about two weeks. All responses are anonymous, of course. This is an exciting and participatory way to create empirical data that we as a group will share with the world, of course, but that could also be used for academic papers and other more 'serious' endeavours.

After you take the survey, we encourage you to tweet it, blog it, and otherwise share it with others who read aid and development blogs. If you have a blog of your own, please post it!
Thank you in advance for your time!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The worrisome shift to the right of Nordic development cooperation

Image
As a new minister for development and trade takes over #globaldev in Finland, it is time to take a closer look at how profoundly the foundations of Nordic global engagement and development cooperation are changing. Ann Danaiya Usher from Development Today writes : For the first time, a party viewed as being far-right on the political spectrum takes over the aid portfolio in a Nordic country. Finland’s new Development and Trade Minister Ville Tavio from the Finns Party is cutting aid and linking assistance to the return of asylum seekers. NightCafe prompt "feminist foreign policy" Even if the Finns Party rejects the “far-right” label, Finland is not the first country in the Nordic region where populist, right-leaning parties and coalitions are dismantling the foundations of their historic development policies. Denmark-a new Nordic UK? Until the beginning of the year Denmark was in the news until the initial plans to process asylum seekers in Rwanda was suspended . But increas
Read more

61 authors, 39 chapters & 3 very happy editors! Our Handbook On Humanitarianism & Inequality is finally published!

Image
There is a folder with close to 1,000 Emails in my Outlook that documents the process of publishing our Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality from Silke's first idea in May 2021 to its publication in February 2024! And then there is the space in Teams with more than a dozen folders and hundreds of documents that we used to remotely edit this great volume (criticize Teams all you want, but it has proven to be a very, very useful tool to manage, well, a team across continents, time zones, tasks & a bloody pandemic...). And after all this remote, digital work it was fantastic to open a box with physical copies of the book! The 39 chapter handbook examines how legacies of colonialism, gender, class, and other markers of inequality intersect with contemporary humanitarianism at multiple levels. Authors include academics, pracademics and practitioners and examine a range of contemporary issues including the role of the media and technology, the COVID-19 pandemic, linguistic
Read more

Thirst (book review)

Image
After I watched a quite terrible promotional video from charity: water and ended up buying its founder and CEO’s biography Thirst. A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission toBring Clean Water to the World  I was prepared for the worst. But despite my extensive readings of aid worker biographies and a fairly critical approach towards ‘disruptive’ charitable ideas in development Thirst surprised me in some ways. It is one of the most, for lack of a better word, schizophrenic development tales I have read in a long time, the tale of a 21 st century charity that fundraises millions and positively impacts the lives of millions-and a tale about a lot of things that are going wrong in contemporary development whenever a white American man is looking for ‘redemption’ and needs to find it in a village in Africa. Thirst is definitely a book you should read, but with a different educational trajectory in mind perhaps than the author intended; rather than seeing Harrison’s journey
Read more

Should I consider a PhD in International Development Studies?

After the Economist’s piece on the (non-)value of doing a PhD and some comments later (e.g. Prometheus doesn't read the Economist (I like the slightly cynical dichotomy between ‘civilians’ and the ‘academic insiders) or the ' 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School ' (they are only halfway through so check it out regularly in the future...) I had an interesting conversation with a prospective PhD student a few days ago. This was not the first time that I had been approached about doing a PhD and I always try to be as frank as possible, even playing the ‘devil’s advocate’ when it comes to the complicated ‘should I or shouldn’t I?’ decision-making process. At the end of our conversation I sat down and tried to summarize a few important and generic points from the point of view of doing a PhD in Development Studies and in the UK . I understand that every case is different and involves a range of motives, options and rationales, but there a few important questions and t
Read more

Dear white middle class British women: Please don't send used bras (or anything, really) to Africa

Image
I am supposed to be on my summer blogging break , but the world of bad development does not seem to take a vacation... The first time I came across the #SWEDOW (Stuff We Don't Want) debate about what to do with unwanted stuff and whether to send it to 'Africa' was in 2010; in fact, I wrote about a shoe donation project on the blog in 2012. Fast forward to July 2019 and a local British Women's Institute Facebook page with about 500 page likes is posting a picture of two innocent-looking parcels that has been shared very widely. The vast majority of the 500+ comments under the post are positive and I am sure that both charities will receive quite a few parcels in the next few days. It seems almost futile and pointing out bad examples of charity and development is not always the best way to communicate, but I anonymize the post as much as possible to avoid simply shaming a particular Women's Institute chapter. 'Rapey men here are the same as rapey men t
Read more