Another year has come to an end! On this first day of a new year, new month and a new week, the Newsletter team wish you a fantastic kick-start. We have many reasons to celebrate the year 2018; one being we will soon be one year old, but the biggest joy is each day we are celebrating altruism in the Scientific Community.
The Newsletter team, together with Club SciWri and CSG, worked relentlessly to provide a collaboration platform to STEM professionals who are passionate about Science beyond the laboratory doors.
Being the first year in circulation, we have faced a few organizational hurdles. However, with each success and mistake, we learnt a lot. Through our 40 campaigns in 9 months, the team kept chasing the vision “for the scientist by the scientist.”
We ensured an amalgamation of different aspects of science. Our repository has it all!!! Whether, the articles are essential for career development/job offers, or for the stories which leave us awe inspired by the beauty of science, there is real value in the stuff.
(Topics we shared in the Club SciWri Weekly Briefings, Image courtesy Rituparna Chakrabarti)
As the New Year begins, we decided to have a recap on0 how we grew more vibrant as a team. Among the best additions to our group, the bunch of freelance writers stood out. Aditi (Chiplunkar) Khandekar, Nidhi Subhashini, Sven Truckenbrodt and Tanmoy Samaddar have been the key players in our content research, design and writing. Abhiyan Viplav, Kashyap Krishnasamy, Nisha Peter, Vignesh Narayan Hariharan and I have been the Hawk eyes for the editorial job. We are delighted that midst the organizational restructuring, the successful collaboration and extensive understanding between the writers and the editors assured campaign publication every Thursday, during 2017. Every team needs a backbone, for us Somdatta Karak took up the role gracefully. She assured initial smooth sailing and tethered the team spread across 4 different time zones.
(In the Image: Top row (L-R) Kashyap and Somdatta; Middle row up (L-R) Rituparna, Nidhi, Abhiyan and Tanmoy; Middle row down (L-R) Sven and Aditi; Bottom row (L-R) Nisha and Vignesh)
We are extremely thankful to have our SciArties Vinita Bharat’s Fuzzy Synapse and Ipsa Jain’s IpsaWonders, their contributions added a different charm to our newsletter.
(In the Image: L-R Vinita and Ipsa)
Our Nine Best Shares
Here we recount the most read and liked issues of Club SciWri Weekly Briefings – 2017 from each month.
- April: published on 20th April, 2017
- May: published on 18th May, 2017
- June: published on 1st June, 2017
- July: published on 13th July, 2017 (Our Pick!)
- August: published on 3rd August, 2017
- September: published on 21st September, 2017
- October: published on 5th October, 2017
- November: published on 16th November, 2017
- December: published on 7th December, 2017
The Aftermath
Ours is a young endeavour within Club SciWri. However, we are steadily gaining our readership. This is indeed reflected in our subscription base, as we initially had only 12 subscribers and now we have reached to 530 active subscribers, spread across 3 continents.
The active members of CSG help us achieve our social media readership per campaign in the range of 120 – 2,400. We are thankful to them for keeping the platform alive with their dynamic shares, lively discussions and constant feedback. Secondly, our average campaign ;open rate is 15 %, which is higher than the industrial campaigns (13.09 %). Our 13th July, 2017, campaign witnessed so far the record-breaking 28.02 % open rate.
(The graph depicts the % of open rate, click rate and the industry average open rate of the campaigns published between April- December, 2017, generated using MailChimp)
The core team (Abhiyan, Kashyap, Nisha and I) love to experiment with new content every week and are always taking the lead on how to gain visibility for our contributors. Feel free to leave us your feedback. We hope by the end of 2018, we will reach a subscription base of 2,000 + globally, therefore looking forward to the collaboration with the CSG – University Representatives. Our current readers’ base is mostly concentrated in the USA, France, Germany, the UK and India. Hand-in-hand with Club SciWri we aim to expand our viewership in 2018 beyond these countries.
(Interactive map depicting the top locations where our newsletter is read, generated with MailChimp)
The Newsletter team take immense pride in providing a platform to those who are passionate about science communication with the perk of visibility. If you think you could be one of us in 2018, get connected with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or just drop me an email at rituparna.chakrabarti@sciwri.club.
Our journey so far wouldn’t have been possible without your support and we look forward to many more chapters in the coming year. If you haven’t yet subscribed to our newsletter, we assure you that 2018 will be more exciting.
Happy New Year!!
Cover Image: Pixabay
Rituparna is the lead editor of the Newsletter team at Club SciWri. She pursued her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Georg-August University (Göttingen, Germany) and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Biostructural Imaging of Neurodegeneration (BIN), Göttingen. Over years, she has gained technical expertise in electron and high-resolution light microscopy, in order to study the nanostructures of specialized chemical synapses in the sensory systems. She likes to have a bird’s eye view of her undertakings and gets excited with analytics. Passionately believes in, correct simplification of science, therefore engages in different scientific communication and public outreach projects. To unwind herself she plays mandolin and eagerly looks for a corner at a coffee house to slide herself in with a good read or company.
The contents of Club SciWri are the copyright of PhD Career Support Group for STEM PhDs (A US Non-Profit 501(c)3, PhDCSG is an initiative of the alumni of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The primary aim of this group is to build a NETWORK among scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs).
This work by Club SciWri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
