More than 8,600 people took part in a web survey to tell us the most important reasons why they interact with our site to do with funding and tenders.

Tasks such as finding out about current and upcoming opportunities for funding emerged as the most popular among the 8,630 responses, showing us that our users’ primary need is for practical information on what EU funding is available.

The results of the week-long poll provide us with solid and consistent data about our users and what matters to them.

Going forwards, we have a strong case for creating an ‘information architecture’, or content structure, based on evidence of what visitors to the European Commission website want. It’s in our interest, because the more able users are to meet their needs, the easier it’ll be to achieve our organisational goals, such as allocating funding to the projects that deliver value for Europe.

Here’s a roundup of some of the key results of the poll.

4 ‘top tasks’

Participants were given a list of around 44 tasks and asked to identify the top 5 most important to them when interacting with the Commission in connection with funding and tenders.

Over 25% of votes went to 4 tasks. It’s the kind of correlation we were hoping to see, because it pinpoints a small number of tasks that are relevant to a large proportion of people, the so-called top tasks.

The top 4 tasks for funding and tenders were:

1. Open calls, current opportunities for funding, grants
2. Upcoming calls, opportunities for funding, grants, subsidies
3. How to apply for funding, grants, subsidies
4. Submit an application

How did we do?

Commission staff completed a separate internal survey to see how our answers compared with the user results.

Our predictions weren’t too far off when it came to the task of seeking information on open calls. We underestimated its popularity by 13%, but normally a margin of error above or below 20% is not significant. It was 3rd on our top-task list.

What we really got wrong was the popularity of ‘how to apply’ – we overestimated that by 88% meaning it was number 1 on our list, whereas for users it’s only the 4th top task, less important than finding out about the funding itself.

Areas that we overrate, like how to apply, are often reflected by an overabundance of content on the current site. As we transform our web presence, we’ll be focusing on whether the amount of content on a certain task is proportionate to its weight in terms of the user need. This is why gathering evidence from real users is integral to the transformation process.

The chart below shows how our estimates compared to the answers of our users.

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/eu-digital/

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