What AIDSPortal users are looking for: results from our survey

In March 2008, AIDSPortal users from 26 countries completed a basic survey on how AIDSPortal can better meet users’ knowledge management needs. 19% respondents were from the UK, 19% from Kenya, 10% from South Africa and 6% from India.

Overall, AIDSPortal users are looking to AIDSPortal for the following key services:

• Knowing ‘who is doing what’ at a country level
• Training and professional development opportunities, particularly around online information sharing
• Opportunities to exchange information, especially content that can be used in the community

With this focus, it makes sense that users are looking for ways to make AIDSPortal easy to use and easily adaptable to their particular needs. This includes being able to personalise AIDSPortal, receive alerts and being able to add information from AIDSPortal to other websites.

While some users would find it useful to receive information by cell phone or fixed phone (25%), 75% of users find receiving an email with downloadable information very important or essential to their work.

Most users feel that services on AIDSPortal should be free (90%) but the services that users would pay for include skills training and being able to place advertisements. The majority of users felt that advertising and sponsored links to useful sites could appear on AIDSPortal (80%) and that AIDSPortal can run surveys and polls in order to fund itself (92%).

AIDSPortal will use these results to guide the technical development of the ‘Next Generation AIDSPortal.’ AIDSPortal is committed to exploring and combining innovative technologies to support people-driven knowledge exchange and strengthened responses to HIV and AIDS around the world.