After 21 years at EPA, I’m heading to new issues and challenges at US Citizenship and Immigration Services. I’ll be the chief of the E-Communications Division, working on web and social media. My last day will be November 26, the day before Thanksgiving. I’ve had some amazing experiences here, and a good chunk of myRead… Read more »
On April 23, we launched our new home page design (http://www.epa.gov). Among other changes, we reworked our banners at the top. It used to look like this screen shot: To change banners, you clicked the numbers. Heat maps showed that people did use the numbers to move among the banners, and other analytics confirmed peopleRead… Read more »
A couple of days ago, I taught a webinar for GSA’s Digital Government University. Just wanted to share the URL for the presentation slides and a recording of the webinar, which lasted an hour.
We (EPA, that is) are using a new tool called Thunderclap. Thunderclap is one of the systems where GSA negotiated fed-friendly terms of service, and EPA signed it a month or two ago. I think it has HUGE potential. How it works: 1) An organizer creates a message to be shared and a date/time it’llRead… Read more »
We’re two weeks into the shutdown, with future budgets that look ugly, uglier, and even uglier. I needed to remind myself why I put up with this. Here’s why.
EPA leapt into the social media world in July 2007 with our first blog post. Ever since, we’ve been working to expand our options. That’s been greatly helped by the terms of service that GSA has negotiated on behalf of all federal agencies (most agreements contain clauses we can’t accept as federal agencies for variousRead… Read more »
I taught a session on writing for the Web today and mentioned that it can be fun to turn common sayings into governmentese and then challenging others to decode them. Here are three examples I came up with. Try your hand at deciphering them. Approximately spherical seed-bearing produce, examples of which can be many colorsRead… Read more »
It sucks to be in the federal gov’t right now, at least on paper. Furloughs and pay freezes, lousy public attitudes towards people who’ve dedicated themselves to helping others, helplessly watching as political battles rage, etc. As for the public (as a whole, not individual people), they’ll never fully appreciate us or how hard weRead… Read more »
I get asked regularly for successful examples of using social media, so here’s one. Forty years ago, EPA hired photographers to capture our world, with a special focus on environmental issues. That was the Documerica project. For the past two years, EPA has invited everyone around the world to repeat that effort, sharing photos withRead… Read more »
I’m lucky enough to lead EPA’s Office of Web Communications. I’ve written a lot about our social media efforts, but another one of our roles is to manage EPA’s home page. We redo it from time to time, and this is one of those times. Our effort started a couple of months ago with aRead… Read more »