Communication

The website has always been EQAR’s main communication tool to address its target audiences. An increase of 10 000 website visitors was noted in 2021; bringing the total to 69 000 visits.

Since the launch of DEQAR in 2018, the main focus of visitors  shifted from the list of the registered quality assurance agencies and related information (“Register” section) to the Database of External Quality Assurance Results (DEQAR, “Database” section). Over 39% of all page views was on the DEQAR pages, followed by 18,5% on the Register pages and 17% on the Knowledge Base pages, both of which are linked from the database via the agency and country information.

Newsletters
EQAR issued  five newsletters in 2021, reaching each around 700 recipients.
Newsletter topics included information about the decisions of the Register Committee, external QA activities of EQAR-registered agencies, relevant policy updates and documents with regard to QA and the use of EQAR in the national QA frameworks of the EHEA countries, DEQAR updates as well as organisational updates.

Social Media
EQAR also remained active on social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. In 2021, 64 tweets led to a total of 70 000 impressions (number of times users saw the tweet on twitter) and 2 267 engagements (number of times a user has interacted with a tweet), with an average engagement rate of 3. EQAR gained 55 new followers over the year, reaching a total of 1 828.

A total of 20 LinkedIn posts were shared in 2021, generating an average engagement rate of 7,1% (the number of interactions divided by impressions).  At the end of 2021 EQAR had around 1 400 LinkedIn followers.

The following documents were published in 2021:

• The EQAR Annual Report 2020 was published on the EQAR website in June and was promoted in the newsletter as well as on social media.
• The Policy Brief “ESG Coverage of Higher Education Systems in Europe” was published in June and was promoted in the newsletter as well as on social media.
• The report “Analysis of Register Committee decisions” was published in October. The report was the point of departure for the webinar “ESG Compliance: The Challenges & Lessons Learned from EQAR’s Registration Process” held in October with around 130 participants.
  Read the report and view the recording of the webinar on ESG compliance