Digital Engagement Strategy Series: Tell a Story (4)

By John Simpson, Engagement Consultant at GovDelivery

There are a few basic components that anyone can leverage when beginning to develop the framework for their digital engagement strategy or evaluate an existing one. This blog series will go into each of these basics reviewed in our webinar on Stakeholder Engagement in Federal Government to provide some next steps you can take  to improve your agency’s digital engagement strategy. If you missed it, take a look at parts 1, 2 and 3 to learn more about steps to take when building an engagement strategy.

 Tell a Story (About People)

After all of your hard work developing awesome content and fine-tuning your communications to reach just the right audience, all of those numbers and statistics likely won’t completely sell the success of your project. To get over the finish line and to connect everything together, you need to bring your story back to the people you are serving. The truth is that people connect and relate to stories much better than they can with metrics. Paint a picture of your success that anyone can understand:

• How did you work impact your audience’s lives?
• What behaviors did you change?
• How did you improve the connection between government and citizen?
• How did you use new tactics to solve old or new problems?
• What do growth percentages and patterns in metrics reveal about how you are helping citizens?

The story of your success should be understood by any citizen and at its core should be a tale of good government. Tell a story about people and how you improved their lives.

Much like the other pieces of your digital engagement strategy, your story must connect back to your organization’s business goals. When you begin to develop a narrative around your digital engagement success, map it back to why you started your outreach in the first place.

If you’re struggling with how to connect figures and numbers to people, storyboard the problems you solved and illustrate why the average citizen should care about your office’s work. Infographics are a great way to call out metrics and tie all of your work together into a simple to digest format.

Next Steps

If you’re looking for more information or examples of other government organizations that exemplify these basic steps, watch a replay of our recent webinar, “Best Practices in Stakeholder Engagement in Federal Government”.

If you’re looking to explore how these digital engagement basics can help improve your own outreach or if you want to take your public engagement to the next level, contact us at info@govdelivery.com.