E-Government | Reach The Public

Does channel shift require cultural shift?

We’ve been writing about ‘channel shift’ in government for some time. The benefits of using new digital channels for citizen communications are clear – the Cabinet Office expects the UK government to realise savings of 1.2 billion pounds sterling by 2015 through its Government Digital Strategy.

So, what’s holding us up?

It takes more than time and technology

It’s tempting to see the channel shift issue as an issue of technology and resources. Hire a webmaster to build a better website. Hire someone to post things on social media. Send a few emails. Watch the savings pile up and the citizens rejoice.

If only it were so simple. To deliver a measurable return for agency investments, ‘channel shift’ strategies have to overcome several common obstacles in government organisations.

Decentralised, isolated efforts

For many agencies, the biggest cultural challenge is getting around isolated pockets of efforts and communications. You might hire someone to do Twitter, for example, or maintain a Facebook page that operates on its own, without being part of an integrated strategy to improve service levels.

The result of this approach is isolated ‘silos’ of data that make it difficult to reengage citizens across your multiple channels. This can actually increase your costs (through duplication of efforts) and limit the impact of your online strategies.

Shifting models of engagement with citizens

Government entities face an internet-adept generation of citizens that expects a certain level of real-time communications and interactive relationships with government.

In her paper “Digital Communications and Channel Shift in Government,” government communications analyst Liz Azyan discusses the challenges of adapting to these changing citizen expectations:

“Citizen engagement with the new socially informed generation also calls for two-way dialog. Governments are shifting their view of citizens as consumers and allowing citizens to become contributors in the development of government. ”

Learn from the successes of others

How do you identify and address cultural obstacles? Learning from others is one good way. This blog can be a resource for sharing successes in digital government organisations. And at GovDelivery, we sponsor research and ongoing analysis into what works and what doesn’t.

As part of those efforts, we’re making available a series of white papers by Liz Azyan, a blogger and analyst that specialises in government digital communications. The first of these papers addresses the cultural issues behind channel shift. The paper includes examples of government agencies using digital strategies – including Twitter and Flickr photo sharing – for creative campaigns and citizen engagement. Look for inspiration and guidance – and then share your successes with us.

channel shift, channel shift in government, communications, community, data, digital government, e-gov, engagement with citizens, social media, technology, Twitter, UK Government

Leveraging Technology to Do More with Less

With sequestration officially underway, the phrase “doing more with less” carries more weight than ever before. While cuts are being made across the board, citizens’ needs remain, posing quite a challenging situation for government organizations and their communications efforts. As budgets are forced to become even tighter, organizations are being called upon to serve the needs of citizens by thinking innovatively and creatively.

The need to innovate to solve public sector challenges is quite familiar to Phil Bertolini, CIO for Oakland County, Michigan. While struggling with decreasing revenues and budgets, Bertolini and his team found that citizens were demanding more information than ever before. They quickly realized the need to find an efficient and effective way to meet citizens’ needs while simultaneously meeting the county’s budget.

Realizing that traditional methods would not suffice, Bertolini looked elsewhere, looking to technology as a solution for Oakland County’s communications challenge. The transition to digital communications began changing the way Oakland County handled their communications. Oakland County began placing more and more information online, leveraging various social media channels to reach a larger audience much more quickly than before. Citizens now had easy access to the information they needed through a variety of convenient, online channels that provided savings in both time and resources to Oakland County.

Oakland County is not alone in this transformation. Many organizations are now turning to technology to provide more efficient solutions to increasing communication challenges. There are many other ways in which leveraging technology around your office can help your organization cut communication costs. Here are three examples of where to begin.

Work “in the cloud”. Cloud computing refers to computing resources that are delivered on a network, (most commonly the internet). Working in the cloud reduces office storage and hardware costs because all of your information is online. Many companies, such as Google, provide a variety of cloud-computing applications that include email accounts and collaborative document sharing (GoogleDocs) in lieu of standard office software. The best part? Cloud computing allows this information to be accessed anywhere on a variety of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and e-readers.

Leverage video communications. Video communications can greatly reduce the costs associated with in-person meetings and conferences, travel expenses, and phone bills. While it’s great to have everyone in the same room at the same time, it can be very costly. Videoconferencing allows everyone to maintain the critical face-to-face contact that helps facilitate communications while eliminating the many costs (travel, accommodations and food) that can result from in-person meetings. Videoconferencing also allows for an even larger number of attendees to participate in the conversation. Adapting video communications software can greatly reduce the expensive phone bills most organizations experience. Skype is one example. Skype is a cloud-based software application that allows users to communicate by voice, video, and instant messaging at no cost. Using Skype in place of phone calls (when possible) for communications between employees on a regular basis can reduce the costs associated with company phone bills.

Go paperless. Think of everything that gets printed in your office a day. Flyers and printed information for your customers aside, think of just the memos, notes, forms, and contact lists alone laying around your desk. I myself can count six separate items on my desk right now. Try going paperless. For internal items, you can have scans readily accessible on your desktop. For internal communications between employees and colleagues, you can send emails with attachments to digital documents. These steps can help you reduce the costs associated with printing quickly and easily.

There are many ways to begin cutting costs around your office; it’s just a matter of where to start. Examining your organization’s most extraneous costs is a great place to start. While you may not be able to fully eliminate some of these costs, it’s fairly easy to find both short and long-term reduction strategies.

For more ideas of where to cut costs throughout your organization, check out 22 Ways to Cut Costs in Time of Sequester and watch Phil Bertolini’s video discussing Oakland County’s communication challenges.

communication, communications, digital government, do more with less, Oakland County, saving money, sequestration, technology

When it matters most: reaching citizens and residents

Yesterday, at just before 3 pm, bombs exploded near the finish line at Boston Marathon, often known as the world’s oldest annual marathon.

There are few words that can express the sorrow we here at GovDelivery are feeling – not just for Bostonians but for all the thousands of spectators from around the world who were in the crowd and city yesterday. While Boston may not be anywhere close to your city or town, the fact is that the Boston Marathon attracts runners from all around the world, in a spirit of sportsmanship similar to the Olympics. It’s likely you know someone who knows someone who was there. One of GovDelivery’s very own staff members was nearby during the explosion, with his daughter.

After reading about the explosions on a news website, I sent a text to my best friends in Boston to see if they were okay. Thankfully, as Bostonians, they had stayed home due to the normal disruptions of the marathon. They told me they were paying attention to television reports for updates on the developing situation, but they hadn’t received any other information. They were also following directions from the media to not use their cell phones for fear of cell phone detonation.

As a communications professional working for a communications software company focused on the public sector, I am acutely aware of how a situation like this disrupts our lives and yet, how critical it is for the public to be receiving important, official updates. Listening to the emergency responder calls on the news last night, one of the responders noted that someone needs to get on social media and let people know that the police were sweeping the area in search of other bombs and to stay inside.

In urgent and emergency situations like the Boston Marathon attack, reaching citizens and residents with information can be a matter of life and death. With clients like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), we’ve seen and partnered with government organizations to get the word out when it’s most critical. Here are three communications tips to implement quickly in any emergency:

Leverage your digital properties. Social media is a great way to get the word out about an emergency situation, as Boston emergency responders noted. There’s no denying the ripple effect of social media in reaching an amazing amount of people. But people have become increasingly aware of the rumor mill on Twitter and Facebook. People still want to hear directly from you, and they’ll visit your website to find out more. Your website can hold as much information as needed. Be sure to update your organization’s websites and blogs, with prominent news placement on the home page, as soon as you can when an emergency hits.
Use every communication channel you can. Your organization’s website or blog should be the main hub for information on the emergency. You can post detailed information to these digital properties, from updates on the current situation to links to other organizations that are providing help, such as the American Red Cross, to contact information for key people – either to report a tip or to try and find a loved one. But this doesn’t mean that you should ignore your other channels. During an emergency, the broader your reach, the better. Be sure to use email updates, text messages/SMS alerts, voice messages, and social media postings along with more traditional methods, such as news releases, press conferences, or media interviews, to push your messages out to the public in as many ways as possible.
Communicate whenever you have an update. This seems like common sense but the truth is that, in emergency situations, the public craves information, and you want to make sure that they are receiving official information. During Hurricane Sandy, false tweets pervaded Twitter, adding to the fear of an already chaotic situation. By communicating often, with updates to your organization’s website and alerts going out via email, SMS, and social media, your organization can help provide the news that’s needed to keep the public informed and safe.

To streamline the communications process for the three tips above, offer the public options to sign up to receive updates from your organization. These updates can be via email, SMS, voice, RSS, or social media. This puts your information directly in the hands of the public. A communications platform that supports multichannel distribution with automation can be extremely helpful in times like these. Below, you can see an example from the National Guard Bureau on multichannel communications regarding the Boston Marathon attack.

Beyond handling the immediate logistics of getting people to safety and securing an area during an emergency, consistent communications in the aftermath of an attack like yesterday’s can also provide a stabilizing force.

Today, our thoughts and prayers are with those who’ve been affected by the Boston Marathon attack while we work alongside our many government partners to communicate critical information to the public.

For more information on what’s happening in Boston, visit:

Photo Gallery: The National Guard Bureau responds to the Boston tragedy.

Website:

Email bulletin:

News Widget:Social Media (Twitter & Facebook):

Boston Marathon, communications, e-gov, emergency communications, Facebook, National Guard Bureau, outreach, responsiveness, social media, Twitter

Mobile Communications Change How Americans Live

Mobile: the new frontier in digital communications. This is a voyage in which 87 percent of adult Americans are participating. The mission: to explore new opportunities, seek out improved ways to communicate, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

For example, after the January 2010 Haiti earthquake, individual donors contributed an estimated $43 million to the assistance and reconstruction efforts using the text messaging feature on their cell phones. The first-ever, in-depth study on mobile donors finds that these contributions were often spur-of-the-moment decisions that spread virally through friend networks, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The study found that for 74 percent of Haiti text donors, it was the first time they had used their phone’s text messaging function to make a donation to an event, cause or organization.

Americans are doing many things via their mobile phones that they used to accomplish in other ways. An April 2012 survey finds that 70 percent of cell phone owners and 86 percent of smartphone owners (62 percent of the entire adult population) have used their phones in the previous 30 days to perform at least one of the following activities:

Coordinate a meeting or get-together
Solve an unexpected problem that they or someone else had encountered
Decide whether to visit a business, such as a restaurant
Find information to help settle an argument they were having with someone
Look up a score of a sporting event
Get up-to-the-minute traffic or public transit information to find the fastest way to get somewhere
Get help in an emergency situation

This exploration of new ways to accomplish routine tasks has a broad impact. According to the Pew study, 87 percent of American adults own a cell phone and 45 percent own a smartphone. What is striking about these statistics is that they apply to adults in every category of race, age, education, household income and urbanity. For example, in urban areas 87 percent own cell phones; suburban, 85 percent; and rural, 88 percent. The disparity between rich and poor is minimal with 82 percent of those earning less than $30,000 per year owning a cell phone compared to 94 percent with household incomes of more than $75,000. The disparity is also minimal for other categories, with the exception of age, where 68 percent of 65-plus Americans own a cell phone compared to 93 percent of 18-29-year olds. Smartphones are most popular with 18-29 year olds, college graduates, and people in the highest income brackets.

While a recent Harvard Business Review article states that 68 percent of consumers’ smartphone use happens at home and 46 percent of that time is spent on “me time” activities such as watching funny videos, reading a gossip website or playing solitaire- those statistics are misleading. The reported percentage of all interactions exclude text messaging, emails and voice calls, the basic functions for which people most often use cell phones.

According to the Pew study, activities people use their cell phones for include:

Taking a picture (82 percent)
Sending or receiving text messages (80 percent)
Accessing the internet (56 percent)
Sending or receiving email (50 percent)
Recording video (44 percent)
Downloading Apps (43 percent)
Looking for health or medical information online (31 percent)

Truly the American public is on a voyage to explore the varied ways mobile communication can improve their lives. It’s a new frontier and one that government must capitalize on to ensure the best service available to the public sector.

How is your department utilizing mobile communications?

Digital communications improve customer service

In an era of limited resources, governments need to build strong relationships with citizens and stakeholders, and what better place to start than by improving customer service. That’s just what public sector entities in the United Kingdom plan to do. In a GovDelivery survey of almost 100 UK government employees, respondents identified customer service as the top trend taking centre stage in 2013. At the same time, more than two-thirds of respondents said that government is already working to improve customer service.

Take a look at this infographic that provides a visual overview of survey results. As one of the graphs depicts, customer service is far and away the top priority for the UK government compared to budget or big data. Collaboration, however, comes in at a healthy second place. For a full analysis of the survey results, download the white paper.

The white paper notes that communication with citizens is the first critical stage of customer service for most public sector organisations and one of the easiest to modify to improve services. One way the UK government is improving communication is via strong support for social and digital programs.

For example, the Government Digital Strategy published by the Cabinet Office calls for government organisations to embrace digital services to constituents. New or redesigned services must conform to a “digital-by-default” standard. It also calls for the Central Government to consolidate publishing on the GOV.UK site and raise awareness of digital resources. With such a strong focus on digital communication, the government has an opportunity to engage with and consult the public, establishing the collaboration that develops into good communication, which ultimately leads to excellent customer service. In addition, digital tools can help departments meet their objectives of improving customer service, even during times of constrained budgets.

Despite the government’s emphasis on a strong digital program, only about half of respondents said their departments use social media to communicate with citizens- so there is room for improvement. Find out more by downloading the white paper, which provides an in-depth analysis of the survey findings and to learn how the three top UK government trends for 2013 are related.

channel shift, citizen service, collaboration, communications, community, engagement, Gov 2.0, government services, outreach, technology, UK Government

Do RSS Feeds Still Matter?

Co-written by Mary Yang, Senior Communications Manager, and Anna Stroncek, Marketing and Communications Intern- GovDelivery

The recent Google announcement that it would be shutting down Google Reader has led to a flurry of blog posts and discussions around RSS feeds, their importance (or lack thereof), and what to do now.

What is an RSS Feed?

For those of you non-techies out there, or maybe those of you whom just need a quick refresher on what an RSS feed is, here’s a short and sweet explanation.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which is essentially a format for delivering regularly changing web content. RSS feeds allow a user to subscribe to their favorite news sources, blogs, websites, and other digital properties, and then receive the latest content from all those different areas or sites in one place, without having to repeatedly visit each individual site.

Picture your Twitter Feed filled with postings of new content from your favorite sources rather than 140 characters informing you of which friend is currently enjoying the new vanilla spice latte from Starbucks, #delicious.

RSS was developed in the 1990s, giving websites the ability to push information out to their subscribers as opposed to a subscriber having to check for new content by going to each individual website. This new development brought on increased capabilities for websites and blogs to capture new visitors and turn them into returning visitors, as well as helping to increase the online ranking of the website to bring increased overall awareness.

Now fast forward to 2013. RSS feeds still exist, and they still do get used. However, they’re no longer the new kid on the block, so they’re not as ‘popular’ as they once were. More and more that small orange widget seems to go missing from the ever-increasing lineup of widgets on any given website.

With all the buzz surrounding social media, it’s easy to argue that RSS feeds are dying out and becoming a thing of the past. Who needs to subscribe to RSS feeds when you can get instant news and updates from outlets like Twitter?

Maybe that’s what Google’s thinking by shuttering Google Reader, which, just a few of years ago, was the RSS tool to use. But what’s next, especially with this new development in the tech world?

The Future of RSS

Today’s world is filled with massive amounts of information. According to IBM, 90% of today’s existing data has been created in just the past two years. People no longer sit down at their desktop and surf the web for an hour a day. Instead, they are constantly creating, searching for information, and retrieving content from all types of devices – smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and laptops. As these digital technologies continue to evolve and move in a more mobile direction, new opportunities arise for technologies like RSS.

Hot new mobile applications like Flipboard provide a great example of how RSS feeds can be leveraged to bring updated digital content to customers. Flipboard publishes content from thousands of sources via optimized RSS feeds. Publishers are pushing out their new content via RSS, and Flipboard leverages these feeds to users in a magazine-like layout (within Flipboard). This application can be used on smartphones, tablets and e-readers bringing customers the content they desire in a simple, convenient, personal and aesthetically pleasing way.

Another example of leveraging RSS feeds is the application Pulse. Pulse, quoted by Steve Jobs as “a wonderful RSS reader”, is an elegant newsreader application that uses publishers’ RSS feeds to read and publish content. Pulse brings its 25 million (and counting) users their favorite blogs, magazines and social networks to one place at one time. Similar to Flipboard, their application is compatible across iOS and Android platforms, but also makes content even more accessible and convenient with its compatibility to Windows, Nook, Kindle, Xbox and the web.

These two applications have been around for a while now but still mainly pull from well-known publications or newspapers. With the death of Google Reader on our doorstep, tech firms are already on the hunt for Google Reader’s massive user base. Digg announced just this week that they’re speeding up the release of an RSS reader/application. But in their statement, they note that they’re going to push the envelope of RSS too:

We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting.

So what does this mean for you?

The demise of Google Reader sounds like an open invitation for some tech firms to start innovating on a well-defined technology to make it more relevant and integrated into the tools we’re already using every day. This could mean that RSS feeds could become the new cool in digital technology, and since it leverages technology that’s fairly stable, you could roll with this curve once it hits simply by instituting an RSS feed.

Much like magazines and newspapers, governments and their organizations possess a lot of information and produce a lot of great content. However, it can be a challenge to attract regular visitors to your digital properties, which is why RSS feeds and proactive communication comes in handy. For GovDelivery clients, all your digital communications created and sent out via the Digital Communication Management (DCM) platform can be collected in an RSS feed, allowing you to push content out to your citizens and stakeholders easily. One great example is the Driving Standards Agency (DSA) in the UK. They offer different types of RSS feeds, tailored to the topics they’ve defined in GovDelivery DCM:

Their digital communications management system allows them to segment their RSS feeds so readers don’t have to figure out what’s important – if you’re an instructor, you merely subscribe to their instructors email topic or you follow their instructors RSS feed.

Another great government example is the White House. The White House has developed a mobile app that pushes out content from The White House Blog, press articles, photo galleries, LIVE stream videos, speeches and more all by way of RSS feeds. The app is visually appealing and easy to navigate. This is a great way to emulate apps like Flipboard and push your organizational content into the mobile sphere while leveraging content and tools you already have available.

And although the White House may have a slight advantage over smaller government entities in terms of content (a live stream of the State of the Union), state and local governments can leverage RSS feeds and content that’s already available to inform and educate. People like to know and see what’s going on where they live. So take a look at what your organization currently produces (blogs, photos, events, news updates, videos, etc.) and find out if you can pull those pieces of content into an RSS feed (or multiple RSS feeds) to help expand your digital communications reach even more.

Do you use Google Reader personally? How do you feel about the announcement? Let us know what you think might be ahead for RSS feeds in the comments.

collaboration, communication, community, digital government, e-gov, engagement, Google Reader, RSS, social media, technology, Twitter, web 2.0

How NHS could benefit from proactive public health alerts

By Kathy Kyle, Digital Communications Consultant, GovDelivery

A recent BBC article explores how the National Health Service (NHS) has spent £13 million on public relations and whether the Trust and the public is receiving value for money. Some NHS Trusts have commented that the use of PR firms is necessary to educate the public on health issues, especially with regard to high-profile public health campaigns.

There is no doubt that when it comes to public health, proactive, timely, and targeted communications can raise awareness, prevent illness, and inform the public, keeping them safe and healthy. Whether it is a campaign regarding healthier choices around smoking, caffeine, or alcohol, an urgent international health crisis, or every day communications with the public to keep them healthy and safe, the value of proactive communications can – and should be – evaluated. Government healthcare organisations and institutions can be much more effective with digital communications by measuring reach, engagement, and in-person visits. This not only bolsters public trust in the system and saves funds, but can dramatically improve healthcare outcomes.

NHS communications staff can potentially demonstrate the return on its digital investment on a campaign basis by measuring any correlation between the reduction of reported illnesses, office visits, and avoidable contact and the increases in the number of people subscribed to digital communications, engagement rates with digital messages, web traffic, and social media follows.

Instead of focusing funds and efforts primarily on PR campaigns, NHS could complement its outreach efforts by maximising direct connections with the public using an integrated digital communications platform. This kind of platform is available at a fraction of the cost of hiring an external PR firm. GovDelivery Digital Communication Management (DCM) is one system that has been successfully used for proactive public health programmes in the United States by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Centres for Disease Control (CDC), and many state Departments of Health – as well as in the UK by the Health Safety Executive (HSE), Health Protection Agency (HPA), Department of Health, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), and the Food Standards Agency (FSA). These government institutions and organisations are directly connecting, educating, informing and engaging the public without spending a fortune – and their internal staff are easily managing the message and the process.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s goals include safeguarding public health by ensuring that the products they regulate meet required standards, that the products work and that they are acceptably safe. From a communications perspective, MHRA must ensure accurate, timely and authoritative information is provided to healthcare professionals, patients and the public.

MHRA uses GovDelivery DCM to send nearly 28 million messages to opt-in subscribers; more than 50,000 stakeholders around the UK have self-subscribed through the Agency’s email alerting service. MHRA must ensure a high message delivery rate due to the time-sensitive and potentially life-saving nature of its alerts. If you’ve ever had to ensure that a message was delivered quickly, with metrics to ensure it was delivered, you know how difficult this can be to manage in-house. There could be serious consequences if messages are delayed in reaching pharmacists, physicians and the public. By partnering with GovDelivery, MHRA leverages GovDelivery’s active management of relationships with all major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on behalf of over 550 public sector entities worldwide. MHRA is then assured a high deliverability rate, and MHRA communications staff can spend their time engaging directly with constituents, ensuring potentially life-saving, time sensitive medical and drug-related messages are delivered, instead of troubleshooting why messages are caught in filters and flagged as spam. View the complete MHRA success story.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a $941B organisation with over 65,000 staff, invests in health care, disease prevention, social services, and scientific research. HHS was already reaching a large audience through its use of GovDelivery email alert subscriptions, when the H1N1 pandemic flu outbreak threatened the United States. HHS needed to reach the largest audience possible to ensure individuals were kept informed and safe.

Email subscriptions to Flu.gov information increased more than ten times the normal rate due to higher interest as well as collaboration with CDC and other partners in the GovDelivery Network. Average new subscribers exceeded 3,000 per day versus the previously established average of 215. Over one million email alerts were sent to subscribers at their request regarding H1N1. Emails included “Share This” links with content being repurposed and shared over 120 times via social media channels. HHS also cross-promoted the email alert service with social media networks. Twitter links embedded in email alerts generated more than 10,000 clicks and helped boost HHS’s Twitter followers. View the entire HHS success story.

The difference between proactive digital communications and a PR campaign without measurable impact has more than just financial repercussions. Now more than ever, investments in communications must be made with the goal of building and sustaining public trust and health.

Kathy Kyle
Digital Communications Consultant, GovDelivery

Kathy can be reached at kathy.kyle@govdelivery.com or on Twitter @bonominiyogini.

citizen service, communication, community, digital, digital government, e-gov, email, engagement, GovDelivery, government, local government, outreach, responsiveness, technology, UK Government, web 2.0

Going All Digital: How to Move Paper-Based Transactional Messages Online

I don’t have to tell you how constrained government budgets are these days. If you work in government, you know the depth of budget cuts and lack of resources – but this doesn’t mean that you stop doing the important work you’ve done before. You still need to communicate with your citizens and stakeholders about your services, from recycling updates to open park times to tax updates.

A recent white paper titled, Cutting the Costs of Paper: Digital Delivery of Government Messages & Statements, may provide another perspective on how to better reach citizens and stakeholders with important, personalized messages while working within constrained budgets. The white paper notes:

Many government agencies are achieving efficiencies through e-government initiatives that move processes and communications online. Yet paper is still an essential part of many communications between agencies and the public. These paper-based processes are often a bottleneck, slowing down essential processes such as payments while increasing costs for handling paper.

Some agencies send high volumes of these transactional messages, which often represent a sizable cost to the agency. The cost of printing and mailing is just the tip of the iceberg. Keeping these business processes on paper creates significant follow-on costs for handling inbound forms or calls. By moving these printed messages to electronic mail, agencies can realize significant cost savings while streamlining business processes and becoming more efficient.

What’s a transactional message? The white paper gives some examples, but it may be easier to start with a private sector example. For instance, if you have a credit card, you can usually set up a recurring email alert to notify you when your balance reaches a certain threshold. I have one of my credit cards set up to send me this kind of email alert; but it doesn’t just tell me that I’ve reached a certain balance, it also tells me exactly what my credit card balance is in the email. And then it gives me the option of clicking on a link to see more information through my credit card portal.

How would this work for government? An easy example would be property tax statements. Usually this information is mailed to the citizen or business, with a paper statement for payment, if that’s required. Because of the very specific information contained in the statement, it’s been easier for organizations to collate this information and print it, then mail it. The other option has usually been to implement or install an enterprise system that’s expensive and large to manage. But with advances in technology, especially with application programming interfaces (APIs), this is no longer the case. Legacy financial or citizen relationship management systems can remain intact while APIs do the work of pulling in personalized information and then sending out these transactional messages to their intended recipients. Transactions with government organizations that were generated from paper-based communications can move to an all-electronic process, saving your organization time, money and resources.

The white paper goes into more depth. But why not hear from an expert? GovDelivery’s Technical Product Manager, Tor Flatebo, is discussing this very topic on a live webinar on March 27. The webinar is free, and you can pick Tor’s brain on all the ways transactional messaging can work for your organization. Register today.

APIs, citizen service, collaboration, communications, community, digital government, e-gov, email, engagement, Gov 2.0, government services, responsiveness, technology, web 2.0

Email: The Major League Player

When you are formulating your digital communication strategy, what tools form the foundation for your execution? Social media is most likely the first thought that comes to mind these days. And understandably so; social media, in its many forms, can be a very effective communications tool. However, email remains a key tool, especially in the evolving communications industry.

Jeremy Greene, VP of Product Management at GovDelivery, recently shared these key success factors in digital communication strategies during his “What’s Next In Digital Communications” presentation at our kick-off event of GovDelivery’s 2013 Communications Tour. To find out where the next tour stop is, click here. Here’s a quick summary of some of his main points:

1. Email remains the foundation of digital communications
Of the over 80% of adults who are online, 94% of those adults are leveraging email. These are numbers that are hard to ignore. To further illustrate just how large the email user base truly is, picture this for a moment: if the following communication platforms were countries, Facebook would have a population of 1 billion; Twitter would have a population of 200 million (the size of Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakstan); and email’s population would be a whopping 3.2 billion.

2. Multichannel communications
The main goal is to create content once, and then push it out through all of your communication channels. Chances are, you and your colleagues don’t have time to create new content for each of these channels on a regular basis. This model is often known as the C.O.P.E method (Create Once, Publish Everywhere).

This can be done from either angle as a starting point. In other words, take content from your blog or email newsletter and use the same content in your Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and any other communication channels. Or pull content from your social media feeds and use it to create email newsletters. This is an efficient and effective way to get information to your audience faster and increases the opportunities for your content to be shared within multiple channels.

Jeremy suggests adding an icon option on your website that allows for people to sign up for a weekly digest of all tweets that come out of your organization. He says this “tends to gain a lot of traction” and that “many clients have more recipients on their Twitter email list than they actually have of Twitter followers.” Find out where your target audience is hanging out — which social media channels they are already using — and hone your focus to those.

3. Messaging optimized for mobile
How do your current communication efforts look on a mobile phone? More people are using their phones to check email and surf the web, and this continues to grow as “78% of US email users will also access their emails via mobile by 2017” (Forrester Research, 2012). In fact, “43% of email is now opened on a mobile device” (Litmus, Email Analytics, 2012).

Jeremy emphasizes the importance of “taking the time and due diligence to make sure that the content that you’re creating looks good on a mobile device.” If you aren’t, less than half of your intended audience will see the message on a device that isn’t optimized for mobile use. The take-away here? Take the extra time and really focus on making your digital communications optimized for mobile.

4. Capturing subscribers during key contacts
Jeremy recommends taking an audit of all the customer touch points that you have with your citizens, and try to turn unhappy moments into a positive experience. For example, if someone is unhappy about missing a town meeting, instead of just giving them the next date, ask if they would like to get signed up for email alerts for all future meetings. Use various opportunities to capture subscribers.

Do you know the answer to this question? (Knowing the answer can be a powerful way to find out where you should be focusing your communication strategy.)

“What percentage of my audience within the last 90 days has seen any of my content?”

To find out how you can get this information, if you don’t have it, attend one of our stops on our 2013 Digital Communications Tour. We’re traveling to different cities nationwide to get the word out on best practices & trends in digital communication. Hear from public sector experts, providing insightful perspectives and strategies on government communications, and from your peers in government on their successful tactics and projects. Register today. Space is limited!

Citizen Engagement, communication, community, content, digital government, e-gov, email, engagement, innovation, local government, outreach, social media, technology, Twitter, web 2.0

Becoming a Hero to Returning Veterans and Families

By Lance Horne, General Manager, GovDelivery Federal Team

Last year, Forbes magazine published an article written by a United States Marine Corp sergeant about what it’s like to return from combat. While warfighters are thrilled to be back, many face the surreal task of returning to the life they knew before combat. They come from an environment of unquestioningly taking orders, living in close quarters with their fellow soldiers, and under the constant stress of combat that few of us can easily relate to. Yet they are expected to come back and instantly integrate.

A number of federal agencies face a daily challenge of re-integrating the military when they do return from combat, and making sure returning warfighters are receiving the benefits they are entitled to. Federal agencies have quickly realized that they need to take their communications game up a notch or two to give these veterans and their families the information they need and deserve post-deployment. This has proved to be a perplexing problem, but there are things that can be done to improve.

Federal agencies feel compelled to deliver communications to warfighters and their families – especially when they come home – in a friendly and reliable manner. However, having the expertise to communicate in such a way is a special skill. And if we look back at what I talked about in my “Reach out …” posting a couple of weeks ago, more effective government-to-citizen (G2C) communications can boost an agency’s image and position it as an essential part of citizens’ lives. So where do agencies turn for help? Well, for starters, they could rely on technology partners to help them set up the means and the recommended communication channels to make talking with returning military and their families much more effective.

In the long run, finding the right technology partner is more cost-effective than trying to develop the systems on your own. For federal agencies, it has become essential to not only clearly and empathically communicate with returning military and their families, but to be able to gather feedback and open a two-way dialogue with them as well. Having an ability to communicate in such ways heightens the overall effectiveness of communications and makes the warfighter and his or her family feel more like they are participating in the process of reacclimating to civilian life and playing a strong role in the process of getting the information they need.

One such example of how effective communications can benefit warfighters comes from Washington state, where some war veterans were enrolled in Medicaid but not taking advantage of federal benefits. The state informed them of this discrepancy, and the vets were moved off Medicaid and onto federal programs, saving the state $30 million since 2004.

Once you have a steady stream of feedback from the audience you’re communicating with, what do you do with all of that data? As described in my last blog, “Taking an Entrepreneurial Jump on the Cloud“, agencies are starting to move to cloud computing to access and store data. Using traditional technology to wrestle meaning out of the information at your disposal is challenging.

New technology that you can coordinate through cloud computing will allow you to query gigantic data sets so you could find out where subscriber growth is, and when people are most interested in specific information.

If your agency is responsible for communicating with returning warfighters and their families, what has your experience been like? What success have you had? What could you have done better?

citizen service, cloud, collaboration, communications, community, digital government, engagement, GovDelivery, outreach, responsiveness, technology

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