New material is available on ACU Measures, the ACU’s new online benchmarking service. Users are now able to view and download summary results for three focus areas: academic salaries, research management, and gender.

These will give members a quick overview of the aggregate results in the three areas and give universities an idea of the types of output that can be generated in ACU Measures. To view a sample of the summaries, please see here. The full set of summaries – including time series data on salaries – is available on the ACU Measures site.

ACU Measures opened benchmarking to participating members earlier this year, enabling universities to compare their results against averages of the whole sample – or against smaller comparison groups of their choice – and generate downloadable custom tables, graphs and reports on the online platform. To help universities get started, there are also a number of slide shows and reports showing results in the three focus areas.

Emma Falk, the Research Officer at the ACU who is leading the project, said: ‘Universities increasingly require the most up-to-date information in order to build strategy for future success. ACU Measures is a tool that has been designed to help our member universities to not only interrogate the latest data, but to customise their searches and run personalised queries that give them the most useful comparisons for their own institutional contexts. It is not intended as a ranking tool, but instead to help institutions examine, compare, and contrast their current systems and practices.'

The data behind the benchmarking service is pulled together from annual surveys conducted by researchers at the ACU, with data on academic salaries stretching back to 2004. Data collection for 2014 was completed at the end of last year through the ACU Measures site and forms the basis for benchmarking in the three focus areas.

'The accuracy and relevance of the benchmarking data is largely contingent on our members participating and providing quality data,' Emma Falk added. 'The data that members get out of the survey is only as good as the input we get from our members.'

Speaking of issues concerning privacy, she added: 'Whilst this service will facilitate the sharing of experiences and aid the dissemination of good practice by providing university leadership with information about performance in specific areas, privacy is also hugely important to us and participating universities.' The ACU assures that responses of individual institutions will be kept private and anonymous, and that individual responses will only be available to users from that respective institution.

For more information on this new benchmarking service, please visit the ACU Measures page.