A blog about government-to-citizen digital communication and engagement, Government 2.0, GovDelivery, and other e-government issues
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Email Communications for Government in the Era of Social Media

May 15th, 2012 | Posted by Mary Yang for GovDelivery in E-Government | Email Communication | Government 2.0 | Social Media - (0 Comments)

It’s hard to dispute that 2011 was the year of social media. The average number of tweets on Twitter rose from 50 million to 140 million. LinkedIn set records as the largest Internet IPO since Google. And over half of Facebook’s 845 million users logged in daily. Some headlines even claimed that “email is dead.”

But the truth is, even in the midst of a social media revolution, email communications is more important than ever. In the private sector, email marketing continues to provide a relatively high ROI, with an expected $44.25 average return on a dollar by the end of 2011 according to the Direct Marketing Association. A majority of companies expect to increase their email marketing budget this year, and for many companies, email delivers more traffic to their website than any other traffic source. And while you don’t work in the private sector, your goal to communicate your organization’s message is similar.

Email remains and will remain popular as a source to receive information that’s easily searchable. Plus, email works across platforms – a user on Gmail can send a message to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. In contrast, content on social media may remain more isolated with no universal sharing or searching.

For government organizations, the smart response to the changing face of digital communications is to recognize that while social media will not result in the “death of email” anytime soon, it has certainly changed the way people use it. Your organization must adapt to the new ways your audience seeks out, consumes and responds to online content. Key trends in email and social media that will impact your organization’s communications efforts include:

  • Social media users are significantly more likely to frequently check their email. What are you doing to encourage your social media followers to subscribe to your emails, and vice versa? How are you targeting your communications for this group of users?
  • Younger users are leaving web-based email but simultaneously driving the growth of email usage on smart phones and tablets. How are you updating your communications to reach mobile users?
  • Email will continue to be popular with users who appreciate predictability and reliability. Consider what your audience expects from your communication outreach campaigns and preserve the elements that work.

What is your government organization trying to accomplish with their digital communications efforts? Reach a wider audience? Keep citizens informed? Consider the topics that will spark interest with your readers, how readers will be most likely to respond, and what delivery method will provide messages that are both relevant and timely. Will your message be best received through email, social media or both?

For more information on why government organizations should consider an integrated email and social media marketing approach, check out all of GovDelivery’s blog posts on email communication and social media.

What is your agency doing to strengthen email communications in the social media era?

 

 

Inspiration for blog post from “Why Social Shouldn’t Scare Email Marketers“.

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Digital Communication Best Practices Guide Now Available

May 10th, 2012 | Posted by Mary Yang for GovDelivery in E-Government | Email Communication | Government 2.0 - (1 Comments)

GovDelivery just released a new guide – Public Sector Digital Communication Management Best Practices: The Critical Role of Email – that details tips and strategies culled from more than 500 state, local, federal and international government organizations. Government Technology recently ran an article with some strategies from this guide.

With all the buzz around social media, why is this guide focused on email? The PEW Internet and American Life Project’s recent survey of internet usage showed that 92% of adult online users using email. It’s clear that email is the central hub of online communication. With this knowledge, it’s critical for government communicators to incorporate email as the cornerstone of any communication strategy or outreach effort.

Pew Internet chart

The guide provides public sector employees with more than 20 pages of comprehensive best practices around digital communications and email, and it’s broken up into three main sections:

  • Effectiveness: building the largest possible base by leveraging existing contact lists and promoting sign-up options across organization websites and partners
  • Efficiency: streamlining and automating complex communications across email, SMS/text messaging and social media
  • Engagement: driving users to online and offline activities that create the most value for the public and the organization, ultimately creating mission value and changing behaviors that will create an immediate or, in some cases, lasting impact

The guide showcases examples from all levels of government – from Louisville, KY to King County, WA to the White House and Driving Standards Agency (UK) – to give you a clear idea of how your peers are implementing some of these digital communication best practices.

Here are a few of the tips that I found most interesting:

Effectiveness: Use Social Media to Get More Subscribers and Launch Email Outreach into Social Media

This may seem counter-intuitive but how many citizens know that your city, county, state, department or federal agency has a Facebook page? Or a Twitter feed? Or a blog? By leveraging social media to promote your email subscription services and vice versa, you reach a substantially larger audience.

Remember, it isn’t about communicating through a single channel. You want to push your information out as broadly as possible to reach as many people as you can.

Efficiency: Automatically Send Email Content to SMS and Social Media Channels

With the brilliance of technology these days, you should be able to automate your communication channels so you aren’t manually posting in several different channels.

This means that you should look for a platform or solution that allows you to create an email update and have that update post directly to social media channels or sent via SMS/text message at the same time.

Engagement: Content Best Practices – Provide a Clear Call to Action

In the business-to-consumer or business-to-business world, it’s easy to have a clear call to action: “buy this new product” or “download this coupon.” In the public sector, this hasn’t been as widely followed. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be. This is definitely one of those best practices from the private sector that the public sector can adapt and adopt.

When a reader takes an action from your email newsletter, that is true engagement. And for the public sector, engagement helps drive mission value. For example, in the Midwest, an email update that alerts citizens to snow emergencies and urges them to move their cars off the street so their cars don’t get towed provides a clear call to action that benefits everyone and provides immediate and long-lasting value.

These are just three tips from the guide that I found useful. For more tips, download the full guide at http://direct.govdelivery.com/email-guide.

Does your government organization utilize any communication strategies or tactics that have been highly successful? I’d love to hear them. Share your best practices in the comments.

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What is Community Culture?

May 3rd, 2012 | Posted by Joseph Porcelli for GovDelivery in Community Management/Engagement | GovDelivery | Government 2.0 - (0 Comments)

Managing an online community can be like being on recess duty at middle school when all the kids are hopped on sugar and have been stuck inside for a week because of rain. Having a set of rules that everyone understands and agrees with beforehand can help restore order when everyone is really excited or a fight is about to break out.

We are human beings having a human experience through technology, and in online communities, we are having the experience together. As human beings we show up to life (and online communities) with our own beliefs, expectations, values and desires. In an online community, the conversations we have and actions we take together become our rituals. Online communities need to be designed and managed with all of this in mind.

Having built, launched, and managed more online communities than I can remember, I’ve learned that the community managers who invest in developing, validating, and managing their community cultures have more productive, fun, and resilient communities.

So what is Community Culture? Here is my take that I have adapted from what I’ve read about culture and my own experience:

Community Culture is the shared set of beliefs, expectations, values, desires and rituals that influence the ways in which individuals, groups, and teams will interact with one another and collaborate to achieve common objectives.

Our clients who run GovDelivery Collaboration for their online communities typically do so to increase the effectiveness and efficiencies of member capacity and to increase awareness and change behaviors of those they influence. As Director of Engagement Services at GovDelivery, my team helps government organizations discover the beliefs, expectations, values, and desires of their community members during the Assessment phase. Then, we infuse the cultural knowledge learned in this phase into the design of engagement flows. In addition, this knowledge is used to customize features that increase the value of member participation, driving ongoing engagement that results in productive, fun and resilient communities.

Below I’ve shared the template we use at GovDelivery as a starting point — feel free to use it. Keep in mind this is meant to serve as a general statement for the community as a whole. I recommend you use this as a part of your community guideline and/or moderation policy. It’s important to remind members of the guidelines periodically and when moderating, point to the guideline to remind them of what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Beliefs:  When we are connected, and use common tools to collaborate, we are more effective and efficient at meeting individual, organizational and collective objectives.

Expectations: We contribute what we can about what we know; ask for what we need; keep doing what is working; communicate about what is not working, and when possible, offer suggestions towards the solution.

Values: The spirit in which we take actions:

  • We are thoughtful, respectful and helpful.
  • We encourage each other.
  • We celebrate each other’s accomplishments.
  • We appreciate the diversity our approaches.

Rituals: The actions we regularly take:

  • We read and comment on each other’s discussions and blog posts.
  • We share our best practices and success stories.
  • We ask for help and help each other out.
  • We are factual, cite sources, and make it clear when something is our own personal opinion.

Desires: What we have in common that motivates us:

  • We strive to serve others.
  • We seek to serve each other.
  • We choose to learn and empower ourselves.

Common Objectives: What we are working towards together

  • Objective 1
  • Objective 2
  • Objective 3

Another lesson I’ve learned is that I don’t have all the answers and the best place to look first is the community itself. And so I humbly ask you:

  1. Do you have any suggestions of what we should consider adding to this template? Is there anything you don’t agree with?
  2. How in your experiences have you seen beliefs, expectations, values, desires and rituals contribute to or hinder a community’s productivity, fun, or resilience?

 

Joseph Porcelli, Director
GovDelivery & GovLoop Engagement Services
202-407-7461 @JosephPorcelli

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The Power of One

May 1st, 2012 | Posted by GovDelivery in Email Communication | GovDelivery - (0 Comments)

By Dave Worsell, Director, Government Solutions, GovDelivery UK

I was recently asked to present to the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) for a “Lunch and Learn” session.  The purpose of the presentation was to demonstrate the importance of proactive public sector communications and some of the risks and pitfalls when providing proactive communication on a very large scale.

For many Email Service Providers (ESPs) there is strength in numbers.  If you’re sending 1 million messages for a major retailer it doesn’t matter if a few go missing or if a few end up in spam filters provided the vast majority do reach their intended audience.  After all, the recipient doesn’t really care if they don’t get the latest special offers on wide-screen televisions and provided you sell enough, neither do you.

It’s a very different story if you’re sending safety alerts and public notifications.  Every message matters.  Ensuring Peter, the local pharmacist, removes a polluted batch of medicines from his shelves might be the only thing that matters to his customers.

A recent study by ReturnPath estimated that as many as 1 in 5 emails don’t reach the intended recipient and this could increase to 1 in 4 as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and spam filters get more sophisticated.  What if Peter’s message is one of those?

Building large scale message delivery capability is very difficult and expensive as our blog post, The deceptive simplicity of pressing send, explains.  For this reason, many organisations use ESPs to send messages for them. However, as a government communicator there are some important things you need to know.

ESPs go to great lengths to ensure deliverability rates are as high as possible.  They work with the ISPs to manage reputation.  It’s important for them that your “sender reputation” is as high as possible. Why? Because, your reputation impacts their sender reputation and this impacts the reputation of all their clients.

In order to maintain reputation scores and highly impressive deliverability rates (99%+) major ESPs provide sophisticated content filters and spam analysis tools and insist you check your messages deliverability score before you can send the message.  It’s down to you to make the necessary changes to any message that fails these tests.

What happens when you can’t change the message?  What if your message contains keywords that trigger spam filters? For example, the product you’re recalling is a Viagra tablet with a dangerous pollutant or the campaign is about a drug awareness course?  What if you can’t re-write a ministerial statement because it fails the spam checks?  Even if you could, do you have time when lives are at stake?

Before deciding on which ESP to use take a quick look at their delivery rates but much more importantly how they achieve them.  Using message pre-parsers and spam scoring tools is great for ESP reputation management but when you need to get a message out urgently is it what you need?

GovDelivery sends 262 million notifications each year for UK government and this figure is predicted to reach 2 billion in a few years time.  However, it’s delivery of one message that matters most.  The power of one.

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Top 7 Ways to Engage Event Participants Online & Offline

April 26th, 2012 | Posted by GovDelivery in Uncategorized - (0 Comments)

If you’ve coordinated an event, you know the typical challenges. What are the topics you’ll cover? How do you keep participants informed and involved before and after the event? How do you increase participation? How do you build momentum for an event that’s months away?

With restrained budgets and more pressure to justify attending an event, the criteria for a successful event is higher now than ever before. You not only need to meet registration numbers but you also need to boost engagement and create a community for event organizers and attendees, especially when participants are geographically dispersed. With new technologies, this helps strengthen the collaboration and knowledge-sharing that occurs at the actual event and encourages the same collaboration in an online space.

Here are some tips to help you engage your stakeholders before and after the main event:

1) Know what participants want: Determining event content can be a challenge in terms of hitting the mark with your participants. So why not open up a discussion forum and let people share their thoughts and ideas for content before the event is held? There are a number of online tools that will allow you to collaborate with registrants around sessions and topics.

2) Make it easy for participants to “own” the event: Gather feedback from participants that lets them feel they are helping to contribute meaningful direction or content for the event. Also, give participants the opportunity to invite friends or colleagues that they believe might be interested. Many times, people are eager to be involved, but time limitations prohibit them from fully participating. Offer an easy way for participants to check in on the newest event updates or online conversations when it’s convenient for them. This will help participants feel involved and, in turn, see your event as successful.

3) Send lots of reminders: Amazingly, people sign up to attend events and then either forget or have something else come up last minute that they might be interested in. If you send frequent reminders — letting people know about new speakers, downloadable materials prior to the event, and other information – it helps boost your overall attendance.

4) Make it easy for participants to engage — however they want: Let people contribute on a level that’s meaningful to them, either by giving them the option of uploading photos, videos or even letting them share “My event experience” diary entries on a common site. Also, the easier all of this is, the more likely people will participate.

5) Leverage one event to help you with other events: Maybe you’re planning for one yearly event, but have other activities or events that are related. An event collaboration tool will allow you to export email addresses of attendees so they can be invited to related events and activities.

6) Involve everyone in the community early on: Gathering feedback from interested parties early in the event planning process helps boost attendance and let participants feel that they’re playing an active role.

7) Utilize social media: You need to not only work close through traditional communication channels, but also through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to engage with your participants.

At the end of the day, communication is key. As with any program or initiative you have, the success of your event is based on the communication, and inviting interested stakeholders to join an online community prior to the event is just one way to keep communication lines open and lively. No matter tools what you use to communicate with your event participants, one of your goals for event success should be driving online and offline engagement that drive real value for your stakeholders.

What do you think? Do you have any tips or experience for engaging participants more deeply in events?

Also, if you’re interested in learning more about how GovDelivery can help you be more collaborative, give us a call or email us at info@govdelivery.com.

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5 Tips for Your Communications Career

April 16th, 2012 | Posted by GovDelivery in Uncategorized - (1 Comments)

By Steve Ressler, Founder of GovLoop

Last week, we launched a new GovLoop guide, How to Find, Land, Keep, and Leap in Your Government Career.

In the guide, there are a lot of tips on how to navigate your government career and rise to the top.  While most of these tips apply to the communications professional,  I thought I’d build on these tips and focus this post on specific career advice for all public affairs officials.

So here are my 5 tips to rise in your government communications career:

1) Know the Fundamentals. In any communication career, it is important to know the fundamentals of good communication. Understand the fundamentals of good communications strategy, the makeup of your various audiences and what messages resonate the most.

2) Stay Up to Date. There are always new communications tools being released, and it’s important to stay up to date and explore what these new channels mean for your agency.  Whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest or another channel you just heard about, your job is to help your agency communicate with citizens wherever they reside.

3) Spend Time with the Mission. I’ve always found the best communications professionals have spent some time either working in a business or program office. By understanding the daily rhythms and demands of programs, you can then become a better communication professional when they need your help as you’ve built rapport and understand their needs.

4) Cross-Train. Some people are press officers and spend their whole career only handling press inquiries. The downside of having only one focus is that there are fewer opportunities to get ahead as you only qualify for specific vacancies. So cross-train: spend some time in the press office, time in internal communications and time with business units.  Not only is it more interesting, but you’ll become a more qualified communications officer.

5) Network & Train. To get the next promotion, it’s important to have the necessary qualifications and to network.  Join great organizations like Federal Communicators Network and National Association of Government Communicators.  Attend their annual conferences, and take the training you need to grow in your career.  Your next promotion will probably come from the network that you build at these events.

Bonus Tip: Measure your results. The best communications professional measure and analyze what’s worked and can show the ROI of their communication. Have you doubled the audience receiving your organization’s messages? Increased the number of opens or folks actually that engaged with your message? Has this translated to mission results or cost savings? Keep track of these metrics, and you’ll fly up the communication chain, having built-in arguments when you need to defend your budget and positions.

Do you have any tips you’d like to share? What’s worked well for you in your career?

Interested in finding your next communications job?  Sign up for GovLoop’s weekly top 10 communications job email.

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Free Twitter Guide!

April 13th, 2012 | Posted by Mike Bernard for GovDelivery in Social Media - (0 Comments)

Recently, Twitter released a very nice 20 page guide for using Twitter for small business. While the title references small business, the tips they give are completely relevant for government.

Twitter breaks their guide up into 3 chapters:

  1. Get started
  2. Engage your audience
  3. Amplify your impact

In the “Get Started” section they provide a great primer on how to use Twitter. This includes a set of definitions so you can learn the Twitter lingo. So, if you don’t know what a “hashtag” or “retweet” is, you can look to this section for help. This section also includes best practices for setting up and optimizing your profile so people can easily find and begin interacting with you.

In the “Engage your audience” section, Twitter provides some great tips for interaction with your audience. They suggest:

  • Following people and learn from how others use Twitter.
  • Be yourself – develop your own voice and don’t be afraid to communicate as you would talk face-to-face with someone.
  • Give them something more – don’t forget pictures and links to great content you discover.
  • Respond to people who contact you.
  • Tweet often – maybe even set up a schedule for the types of content you will Tweet on specific days.
  • Share, share, share – your tweets don’t always have to be about you. Share the great work other people are doing as well.

They wrap the guide up with tips on promoting your Twitter username, getting more followers, partnering with others and measuring your impact.

Don’t let the title fool you. If you are curious about using Twitter for your organization, don’t hesitate to pick up this free guide.

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Access Anywhere – IRS Goes Mobile with Help from GovDelivery

April 11th, 2012 | Posted by Mary Yang for GovDelivery in Compelling Content | Email Communication | Federal Government | Government 2.0 | Government Success Stories | Integration - (0 Comments)

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) unveiled an updated version of their smartphone application, IRS2Go, in early February. The app was “designed to provide taxpayers easier access to practical tools and information,” and the update included an application programming interface (API) integration with GovDelivery Digital Communication Management (DCM), which allowed app users to sign up to receive Tax Tips via email from the IRS.

As this was GovDelivery’s first mobile app integration using our API, I wanted to find out if the app would extend the IRS’s reach with regard to its email subscriptions. With some help from our seriously awesome team here at GovDelivery, we looked at the IRS’s DCM data to see if their app and integration to GovDelivery DCM positively impacted their subscriptions to the Tax Tips topic.

In the first month after the release of the updated app, the IRS received a total of more than 14,868 subscriptions to the Tax Tips topic, and 72% of those new subscriptions from the mobile app! As a point of comparison, subscriptions to the same topic last year during the same one-month period only totaled 4,390.

What can you learn from the IRS’s success?

1) Email isn’t dead. It’s just being accessed a different way. With the growth of social media and text messaging, there are inevitable stories of how email as a communication channel is dying. This is simply untrue, and the IRS’s data is a great proof point. In fact, a recent study on digital trends shows that the increase of smartphones users has led to an increase in mobile email (versus accessing email via a computer): “The mobile email audience for both age segments [12 – 17 and 18 – 24] saw double-digit growth in the past year, with mobile email users age 18-24 climbing 32 percent.” This same report found that “41 percent of mobile users accessed email from their device,” compared to a mere 35.3 percent using their phone for social networking.

Tip: Make sure that your emails are accessible and can be easily read via a smartphone or other mobile device (i.e. a tablet).

2) Give the public information they want. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recent report, The State of Mobile America, shows how apps are dominating mobile phone usage in America. But it also dives deeper, showing that 74% of smartphone owners use apps that provide direct connections to “news, weather, sports or stock updates.”

Tip: You’ve got information that is essential and value-driven for citizens, from recycling updates to severe weather alerts. People want information that’s trusted and can enhance their lives. Offer those kinds of updates, and you’ll see your email subscriptions increase greatly.

Pew Internet_Apps slide

3) Timing definitely helps. Do you think the IRS simply updated their app in early February because it was ready? My guess is no. It was a highly choreographed release, meant to coincide with tax season in the US. And that helped – a lot. The IRS knew that this was a particularly busy period for the agency. They create and have access to the most up-to-date tax information, and instead of relying solely on third-parties to disseminate that information to the public, the IRS leveraged the timing of their release and APIs to integrate their app with GovDelivery DCM to gain more subscribers.

Tip: You probably know the busy periods for your government organization or agency. Leverage that knowledge to run a campaign to increase subscribers for specific topics. If you award grants, why not use an overlay or a prominent sign-up box on your website to a “grants tips” topic just before your agency announces new grants that are available? If your department is responsible for property tax information, take advantage of the periods in the year where you deliver property tax statements to drive email subscriptions to a “property tax information” topic.

4) APIs are the future. Last week, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel tweeted “‘API’ #thereIsaidit #yesitisthesecretsauce #gov20” in response to a Fierce Government article that “speculated APIs would play a major part in the forthcoming digital strategy.” (Source: NextGov) If you want to jump on the API bandwagon, now is a brilliant time to do so. VanRoekel’s new government digital strategy is due out this month, and it will undoubtedly highlight the processes government agencies and organizations can automate to drive efficiency and effectiveness.

Tip: If you’re a GovDelivery customer and you want to find out how you can use our APIs to automate some manual processes, give us a call or email us at info@govdelivery.com. Many of our customers are already using our APIs to automate bulletin sending, subscriber management and other manual processes.

 

Has your agency or government organization launched a mobile app? Do you have an integration in place to capture email so you can continue to communicate with the public beyond the app? We’d love to hear if you’re having success in the mobile arena. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section!

 

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3 Tips on Reaching a Broader Audience with Your Email

April 5th, 2012 | Posted by GovDelivery in Email Communication | Federal Government | Government Success Stories | Local Government | State Government - (0 Comments)

In an earlier blog post, Top 3 Email Tips to Engage Your Stakeholders, we lay out some simple tips on crafting targeted email messages, effectively conveying your message and eliciting responses from your audience. Once you have identified the reason your audience should read your message, worked on a clear and personable communication style, and provided an interactive process for your audience to respond to your information, it is time to consider how to make your email marketing strategy work even better.

Creating powerful and engaging messages for your subscription list will help you attract and retain subscribers, but where do you go from there? Here are three tips on how to ensure your emails reach their optimal target.

1) Save Your Emails from the Spam Filter

A study on commercial email subscriptions revealed that over 20% of permission-based email does not reach the inboxes of intended subscribers. So, how do you keep your emails out of your audience’s spam filters?

Let Your Audience Control Email Frequency

Some users would like a daily reminder of what is going on with your communications, while others may prefer a weekly overview or emails containing information limited to specific topics. Provide the reader with the option to select from daily updates to weekly digests when they sign up for your subscription. Allow them to decide how often they receive messages and they will be less likely to mark your message as spam in the future.

Make Your Message So Good, Your Readers Will Miss It When It’s Gone

Following our tips on creating messages that are compelling, entertaining, personalized and interactive will help you build email communication that your audience looks forward to as a source of value and timely, relevant information. Work to continually improve your content and achieve the reputation of a trusted source, and your audience will let you know when they are not receiving your subscription. Gaining this type of feedback from your readers enables you to respond to any deliverability issues.

Work with a Partner that Provides High Deliverability

Email deliverability is much more complex than many people realize. If you’re sending your email out with an in-house solution, you have to manage all the technical aspects of different email formats, spam filters, and Internet Service Provider (ISP) relationships to ensure they remain healthy, while measuring the deliverability rate of your emails. That’s a lot of work! If you feel that time and effort would be better focused on other aspects of your communications, put a trusted email marketing partner to work! GovDelivery is just one example of a partner that can coordinate your subscriptions, and we offer a 98% delivery rate and the peace of mind that someone with email marketing experience is getting your email to the inbox of your readers.

2) Test Your Email Format

Do you know if you get more opens and click-throughs with plain text or HTML emails? Plain text and HTML emails each have pros and cons. Plain text emails look more like the emails your readers might receive from a friend, and all email programs will display these messages in a consistent way. HTML messages allow formatting like colored text, images and links, and support advanced design features like columns and headers. You may get more clicks and opens with one version versus the other, so be sure you try and continually test both to gauge what your subscribers prefer.

3) Try New Methods to Build Your List

“How do I build my list?” may be the holy grail of email marketing because it is not immediately clear what successful subscription lists are doing right. You need to hone in on what makes your target reader hand over their email address to a subscription list. Here are a few options to consider:

Use an Overlay

Using an overlay, which darkens your website and highlights a small box for email sign-ups can help double or triple sign-ups to your email list.

The Department of Interior recently launched an overlay and saw dramatic results. They were able to increase their email sign-ups from 80 to 90 sign-ups per day to over 300!

To find out what works best for your organization, try testing an overlay form for a month and see what results you receive versus your typical sign-up placement.

The New Trend: Use a Prominent Sign-up Box

If you don’t want to use a pop-up form or an overlay, you can try placing your sign-up box in the top or middle of your website’s screen where even mobile visitors will see it immediately. This way, you can ask for email sign-ups in a way that can’t be missed. Your reader has the opportunity to sign up easily if interested or continue to the rest of your content without disruption. Best of all, this method also successfully generates two to three times the number of email sign-ups as a less-prominent sign-up form.

The City of Cerritos is a great example, with a prominent sign-up box on their homepage. The graphics and visual also helps emphasize the call to action to sign up for updates.

Provide Social Proof and Incentives

There are two key things to include in your sign-up box. First and foremost, ask for the reader’s email address. Second and almost as importantly, provide social proof for why they should subscribe and continue to subscribe to your messages. An automated calculation based on the number of subscribers will help make your case: “Join over 20,000 in-the-know citizens.”

As a bonus, include a short message or a direct incentive to convince the reader why they should sign up. The message might promise “Weekly tips,” “Daily news” or “Personalized links,” while some subscription lists offer an incentive in the form of a PDF e-book, brochure or paper to first-time subscribers. For example, the CDC offered a zombie comic book, while FEMA provided a list of citizen preparedness tips.

Government organizations looking to connect with their citizens via email marketing and subscription lists are already on the right track by providing timely and relevant information, enabling interaction and conversation between readers and the organization, and defining an official yet approachable internet persona. By following these tips for even more effective email marketing, you can leverage your carefully crafted messages to reach a broader audience and produce a bigger impact.

 

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New Facebook Timeline is Coming Your Way: Are You Ready?

March 29th, 2012 | Posted by Lauren Modeen for GovDelivery in E-Government | Federal Government | Government 2.0 | Local Government | Social Media | State Government - (0 Comments)

The New Facebook Timeline is coming your way on March 30, whether you are ready or not. Here are 7 tips to keep in mind so you can put your best engagement foot forward!

1) Cover Image: as you’ve probably seen by now, the most drastic change to the new Facebook timeline format is the new “cover” photo. This landscape image will span across the top of your organization’s page and will provide a great way to visually represent what is most important to you, what best describes you, or highlight an ongoing campaign. This image will look best when it is a high quality image 851-by-315 pixels. Something important to keep in mind is that this cover image can not be an advertisement. Specifically, it may not contain your contact information (URL, email, street address), calls to action or references to Facebook features or actions, such as “Like” or “Share.” See IIIB for all the details in Facebook’s Page Terms.

2) Profile Picture: what was your previous profile picture will automatically default to your new profile picture, only this time it will be in the bottom left of your cover image. To make sure your profile picture renders best, format your image (most likely your logo) to 180-by-180 pixels.

3) Tabs (apps). What happens to my Apps, you ask? Ahh, yes, no need to worry. Your Apps will now become Tabs, and they will be located directly under your cover image. Here you will see your Photos, Videos, Notes, Likes, and Events (if you selected all of these to show previously). You can’t custom edit these Tabs (although there are ways to get around this which I am happy to explain if you are interested offline), although you can move their placement. To do this:

  • Look all the way to the right of your Tabs.
  • Find the little down arrow button and click this to expand the view of your Tabs.
  • Now hover over the Tab you wish to move and click the little edit pencil when it appears.
  • When it appears, look for the “switch position with” and then click on the Tab you’d like to switch this Tab with.
  • You should now be all set.

Quick tip: you can have up to 12 total tabs.

Interestingly, you can create Custom Tabs for your other Apps that have automatically migrated over. To create a custom Tab:

  • Hover over the Tab like in the instructions above, and wait for the little edit pencil to appear.
  • When the pencil appears, click on it and look for the drop-down that says: Edit Settings. The Edit Settings box will pop up.
  • From here you can Remove the app, add a Custom Tab Image, or set a Custom Tab Name.
  • Start by adding your call to action words as the Custom Tab Name, and click Save. To change the image, click Change next to the Custom Tab Image and when the browser pops up, search for your image.

Quick Tip: Tabs are 111 x 74 pixels. Facebook will format any other image to fit this, and it won’t look as clean.

I think the new Tabs functionality is one of the best ways you can use the new format to best promote your brand and engage with users. Check out the U.S. Army for example. It has 8 total Tabs, and some amazing custom tabs including a “Heritage” Tab that currently features Women in the U.S. Army, and a Nation Gives Thanks widget. Depending on your mission objectives, the sky is the limit to how creative you can be. Check out Guess clothing. They have a “Sign up” tab that allows users to sign up with one click on this page.

4) Your Designated Landing Page is Now Gone. Something very important to note is that you can no longer drive users to any landing page except specifically the Timeline page. That doesn’t mean, however, a custom landing page you created previously is gone forever. Instead, it is now a custom Tab most likely called “Welcome.” Check out the City of Marietta, Georgia’s page for example. Before the Timeline format, they had a custom landing page asking users to “Like” their page and sign-up for e-mail updates, Subscribe to receive news from City Hall, events and emergency alerts by e-mail or cell phone (SO SMART). This still exists, it is just moved.

The possibilities to be creative with Tabs are really endless. Check out this page by Yoga Relief – - and look closely at their Tabs. See the big arrow Tab that says “Like Yoga Relief.” Click on that and you are taken to a new page with a giant arrow that asks you to click “like.” Again, very smart. I will stop there with the examples so this post doesn’t become a dissertation. The bottom line is you can be SUPER CREATIVE with Facebook Tabs, so I highly recommend you do.

5) Pin Your Most Important Content for 7 Days! Since the word “pin” is becoming ever more popular these days [cough Pinterest, cough], Facebook is jumping on the bandwagon. Now you can “pin” a post to the top of your page and it will remain there for 7 days. All the nitty gritty details can be found here regarding exactly how to do this.

6) Your Fans Can Privately Message Your Organization. With the new format, a fan can now send a message privately to the organization (if it is enabled). However, interestingly, Organizations can only RESPOND to a private message sent by a fan. Also, to note: this functionality is optional. How do you turn this feature off or on? There is a place in your Admin control panel where you can turn this off and not allow fans to message you. If you think your organization can adequately respond to fan messages, definitely turn it on. If you don’t have the bandwidth, my recommendation is to turn off so you don’t appear to be unresponsive. Here’s a quick post that outlines how to control this message functionality.

7) Last But Not Least – Real-time Insights! If you monitored a Facebook page before the new format, you know you often had to wait typically at least two days to get any feedback on metrics. Now, the wait time is between 5-10 minutes. Check out this TechCrunch article that outlines everything. In short, this makes me very, very happy. It’s actionable data that you can start using right away to influence your next post, and you can’t go wrong with immediate feedback.

 

 


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