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July 1, 2002- December 31, 2002
Report Prepared by: Jean Waters
January 30, 2003

The P2Rx centers engage in many “networking” activities and provide services that are funded by P2Rx funds and other leveraged fund sources.  P2Rx funded activities and these leveraged activities are often interdependent and help P2Rx meet its organizational goals.  The activity and web measures identified in this report are wholly or partially funded by P2Rx funds.

Each Regional information center is unique in terms of audience served, maturity of program, information model, and other factors. These differences make direct comparison of centers based solely or primarily on their statistics invalid. Thus, it should be emphasized that the primary intent of this standard is to facilitate the national aggregation of measures describing the activities of the P2Rx network. 

P2Rx adopted a new standard for activity and web measurement September 26, 2002.  This standard is designed to provide a better representation of the kinds of services P2Rx Centers provide.  The new standard more closely defines where to track different activities and specifies “filters” used to record web statistics.  These filters remove “false” activity from search engine “spiders” that index web pages, resulting in numbers that accurately reflect activity of “real users.”  Also, as much as possible, individual P2Rx products usage is being tracked.

These measures allow us to learn several things:

The majority of people (about 60%) requesting technical assistance are from government or industry.
	Technical assistance activity is considered to be any type of communication (personal, phone call, e-mail, etc.) where a request for information is made and the Center provides information.  This measure represents the most direct contact Centers have with individuals.  In this six-month period, over 1400 individuals were assisted.
^ Top Collectively, about 48% of technical assistance is provided within a center’s region.
	This shows the strong reliance of regional technical assistance providers on their Center.  International clients make up about 24% of clients overall, with GLRPPR providing over 70% of that assistance, we assume primarily to Canada, which is part of the area GLRPPR serves.  If GLRPPR’s international numbers are not included, 56% of technical assistance is provided within the region, 32% outside the region but within the US, and 9% international.
^ Top Collectively the centers produced over 30 newsletters and distributed over 20,000 copies to around 2500 individual readers.
	P2RIC produced newsletters weekly, while some centers produced one or none during the reporting period.  Newsletters represent a “push” of information by the Centers.  They provide promotion of P2, environmental news, information about activities, products, or services, and they promote a sense of community.
Centers organized about 50 meetings with attendance of about 1,000 people.  These meetings were convened on a variety of topics, from regional roundtables to topical meetings with businesses.  PPRC organized 38 of the 50 meetings.
	^ Top The web site use continues to be strong, with over 380,000 user sessions.  For privacy protection, P2Rx Centers do not issue “cookies” to users, or require passwords, therefore users are counted by IP address. While this does not provide an exact number of individual users, it does accurately represent the number of times someone went to a P2Rx web site.
^ Top Although only five centers were able to report the number of visitors that visit ten or more times, over 6,500 users were estimated to have visited ten or more times.  This number has been filtered to exclude “false” activity from web “spiders” that index sites, so should be fairly representative of real users.   Note that this level of reach is close to the combined total reach of technical assistance, newsletters, and list serve activity, which demonstrates utility of both traditional and web outreach. Libraries receive the highest web usage, accounting for almost 65% of user sessions.  This illustrates the utility and the history of internet libraries, especially WRRC’s library, which is linked on several center’s web pages, and accounts for 94% of this activity. If the usage of libraries is not considered, sector resources accounted for 41% of the user sessions and topic hubs accounted for 29%.  The programs directory accounted for 12%.  Again, sector resources are a traditional product that people know about and look for.  Topic hub use is significant and should improve further with promotion.  Currently, only regional program directories are available on Center’s web sites.  The national directory is only available on the P2Rx.org web site.  As funding becomes available, the national directory will be revised to all it to be more current, more searchable, and available to every center.

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Report Notes:

July 1 – December 31, 2002, is the sixth reporting period for the P2Rx Activity and Web Measures. Due to differences in centers’ operations, some centers were unable to report full data, and footnotes with important data caveats follow in the tables below.   Eight Regional P2Rx Centers reported measures for this period.

Data Observation: (this will change)

The first table, Activity Measures, illustrates what types of organizations are served by the P2Rx Regional Centers. The term “client” refers to the person making an information request.  Government made up 6% of the P2Rx Regional Centers’ clients.  The educational and business sectors (business, consultant, trade association, and educational institution) made up 39% of the centers’ clients and 55% were “Other” which included non-profit, media, international clients, individuals, other P2Rx centers and those of unknown origin.  Note that the number of clients assisted for this reporting period, 4,231, is 49% of the total for the last six-month period, in which 8,680 clients were served.  The numbers being recorded for activities vary slightly from center to center.  Some centers include only clients which contacted them directly for information and to which the center replied.  Some centers may include numbers on list serves, numbers of contacts at meetings, or numbers associated with sending newsletters.  P2Rx is currently working on a revision to the activity measures standard to better reflect the kinds of activities occurring at the centers.

The Request Information Totals chart demonstrates the networking function performed by the P2Rx Regional Centers.  Five centers reported networking totals.  Four Centers reported how information requests were handled; 49% were handled within the Center.  External referrals reflect maturation and specialization of the P2Rx network.

The How Did the Client Find Out About Your Center table illustrates that 20% of clients found out about their center through the Centers’ website or URL referral and 24% learned about the Center from a list serve.  Thirty-six percent of the four reporting P2Rx Centers’ clients were referred to them by outside organizations.  This shows the value of networking as marketing for the centers. Fourteen percent of the customers were repeat customers, indicating they found good information/service at the P2Rx centers.

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The Web Measurement Report outlines the number of user sessions (visits) and the number of page impressions reported by the P2Rx Regional Centers.  The number of user sessions for this period, over 548,791 is over 156,800 more than the previous six-month period, which is a 40% increase.  P2rx.org accounted for three percent of the total number of user sessions this period with 15,821.  P2rx.org had 39,439 page impressions this period.  Some centers are filtering their web numbers differently than other centers.  The web measures standard is currently being revised in order to provide more uniform numbers among centers.

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* The P2Rx centers engage in many “networking” activities and provide services that are funded by P2Rx funds and other leveraged fund sources.  P2Rx funded activities and these leveraged activities are often interdependent and help P2Rx meet its organizational goals.  The activity and web measures identified in this report are wholly or partially funded by P2Rx funds.