Web Publishing

Substantiate claims to excellence

When making claims about being superior it is important that you: 

  • give current and correct information
  • back up claims with facts
  • only use genuine testimonials
  • ensure that the overall impression is accurate.

You should not use unnecessary jargon, puffery or be misleading.  For example, if you have slipped in you ranking, do not cite your old ranking to make yourself look better. 

Ways of substantiating claims

Data

Consider using current or recent data that is part of your normal internal reporting such as:

  • rankings or benchmarking data
  • teaching awards
  • retention or success rate for students
  • student satisfaction surveys
  • graduate outcomes
  • employer satisfaction surveys

You could also cite more stable indicators such as:

  • the general number of students you teach and supervise each year
  • dollars invested in facilities 
  • successful innovation or commercialisation activities
  • general success in attracting grants
  • recurring collaborations with prestigious organisations  

Try to make your statements specific to your School or Faculty rather than duplicating general statements about UQ (you can link out to these elsewhere in the UQ Domain).

Sources and maintenance

Consider citing data which is associated with a time period on your 'About' page or research landing page only.  That way you are limiting the pages on your site which you have to keep up to date. The easiest way to maintain time-based data is to match your usual reporting cycles - just include updating these 2 pages in the process. Use more stable indicators in other pages. 

Data which is significant could be lurking in:

  • annual reports
  • HERDC reporting
  • internal reports
  • print publications 
  • presentations by your executive 
  • your school newsletters.

Photos

Photos can act as evidence to illustrate what you are saying.  So if you are describing your investment in teaching and learning facilities and have some great photos, incorporate these in the text with captions.  If you have specialist equipment which is vital to your research, incorporate photos of the equipment - or visualisations made possible by the equipment - with informative captions.

Value and positioning statements

A strong mission or value statement can be perfect to provide meaningful context to factual data.