Surveying Members of Our Online Forum

At Cancer Research UK, we are always interested to find out if we are meeting people’s needs and to see if we can improve our services.  One of our services for cancer patients and their families is Cancer Chat, a fully moderated online forum for people with cancer and their loved ones.

We are currently in the process of setting up new software for this service, but before we started this, we wanted to find out more about how people were using Cancer Chat, how satisfied they are with it and if there is anything we could improve about it.  To do this we sent out a questionnaire to the members asking for their feedback.

Over 400 people responded to the survey giving us quite a strong sample to review.

I am pleased to say that more than three quarters of the respondents stated that Cancer Chat was very or extremely useful and that 93% of them would recommend it to others, which shows that we are getting a lot of things right.

Most of the respondents found it very or extremely easy to use with only a very small proportion stating that they found it difficult to use.  For this reason, we have decided not to make too many changes to the look and feel of the site or to how people will navigate it.  Broadly people seem reasonably happy with how it is now, and we very much want to bring the existing members along with us as well as continuing to grow the membership.

Interestingly more than half stated that they accessed the site through their smartphone, the next biggest group used a tablet with only 18% using a laptop or desktop computer.  This underlines the need for us to make sure that when we transfer to different software it must still be easy to use on a mobile device.

The survey has given us better insight into Cancer Chat and what people like and dislike about it.  We are now looking forward to relaunching it on its new software in the spring of 2023.  This will ensure that we are able to continue providing this much appreciated service for people affected by cancer.

Submitted by: Martin Ledwick Head Information Nurse CRUK

Contact martin.ledwick@cancer.org.uk