A case-for-support brochure sets out the University's research into which pages of a first-day welcome folder actually get read, and invites partners to fund what comes next.
Every Page Gets Counted gathers seven published studies behind the University's onboarding-folder programme, and a case for supporting where it goes next
Every institution hands out a folder on someone’s first day. Few ever check what’s still in it by the tenth.
Slop University does, and Every Page Gets Counted, a case-for-support brochure published today by the Office of Research Outputs, sets out why. Drawing together seven of the University’s published studies — a welcome desk’s own “resolved on first ask” log, a franchise chain’s onboarding consent paperwork, decades of hand-lettered honour boards — the brochure argues that the induction folder handed to every new student, staff member, and volunteer is the University’s most reliable object of study precisely because nobody else is watching it that closely.
A folder makes a promise on someone else’s behalf the moment it’s handed over. Our job is to find out how long the institution keeps it once nobody’s checking.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The brochure draws on work from both the School of Emergent Priorities’ Trajectory Analytics Group and the School of Continuous Improvement’s Adaptive Metrics Lab, and the University filed it under exactly the kind of showcase its funding partnerships depend on: proof that a research programme keeps its receipts.
“A signature is the easiest thing in a folder to check and the least useful thing to trust,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the Evaluation of Evaluation program. “We built the instruments that tell the difference, and this brochure is where a partner can see the whole shelf of them at once.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mczl46.