A Belated GovLoop Anniversary

Life moves fast and often it’s easy to miss anniversaries and birthdays. I’ve had a couple big ones recently and thought I’d step back and honor them. Last week was my 30th bday which I blogged about

September 28^th marked my 1-year anniversary of working on GovLoop full-time. On that date, GovLoop became a subsidiary of GovDelivery (#1 digital communication for government company in world) and I left my day job at Department of Homeland Security.

Yeah, it was scary. It was a big change – moving a hobby to a job. Leaving government.

But I always trust my gut and it just felt right.yes. I had the experience of creating other associations (Young Government Leaders) and endeavors before and none of them ever fully got to their potential because I never focused on them full-time.

So here we are a year later and there has been lots of great additions and
we’ve kept a lot of the same things.

8 things I’ve loved about what been doing about GovLoop this year:

1) Met Tons of Great Govies – With the ability to work on GovLoop full-time, I’ve been able to speak and attend over 35 conferences in the last year from Canada to U.S. from federal to state to local
government. At each conference, it’s been great to meet so many passionate government leaders and hear what problems and successes people are having.

2) Hired a Great Team – For awhile, GovLoop was just me and all the members. But as those who’ve run something before, it can get tiring. So it’s been great to have an amazing staff that is now 5 full-time including me with 3 interns, a cool DC office, an awesome advisory board, that in total enables us to do lots of great stuff.

3) Launched a Conference – We launched the first ever conference for Gen X & Y government leaders – Next Generation of Government – with Young Government Leaders. Over 300 attended, we made the cover of Washington Post, and the energy was just amazing.

4) New Technology = In the last year, we’ve done a lot of cool tech initiatives. We redesigned the
home page, launched an iphone app, changed our email notifications, launched new newsletters, created a per diem calculator, created a data.govloop.com site, and generally just stepped up
our tech game.

5) New Ways to Help Government – We’ve launched a number of new ways to help government agencies. We created some cool GovLoop groups for agencies that needed places to collaborate. We launched an Ideas campaign to help name a government program and even named an Intranet

6) New Series on GovLoop – We’ve launched a bunch of cool new series on GovLoop from online training to live chats to GovLaunches highlighting the best government new sites.

7) Collaboration with Great Sites – We’ve collaborated with a number of great sites from a BackTalk column with Federal Computer Week, on the radio with Federal News Radio, multiple mentions in Washington Post, and a regular series on Huffington Post

8) My Office – Love working out of street clothes and from home. Yes, I still go to DC a lot and rock the suit. But honestly feel great working from home, Starbucks, or more. Good for the soul.

Kept the Same…

While it is great to work on new initiatives, I think it is just as important
to focus on keeping what is working.

A big part of the last year has been keeping what has been working so well.

We’ve kept a number of the great initiatives on GovLoop such as:

-Continue to have fantastic bloggers and thought leaders on GovLoop
-Kept GovLoop a safe place to collaborate
-Continued our fantastic GovLoop Community Leaders program
-Maintained a great set of core amazing groups on GovLoop such as Acquisition 2.0 and Gov 2.0
-Tons of great content from blogs to discussions