10 Rules that Federal Communicators Need to Remember
10 steps you can take to better serve federal customers and support your agency’s mission every day.
10 steps you can take to better serve federal customers and support your agency’s mission every day.
How to equip your leadership with what they need to successfully connect with stakeholders and make the best use of everyone’s time.
For government agencies, a strong brand can help build public trust in our work, raise awareness of our services and help us connect with the very people who fund our agencies.
Feds face constant change, including big changes in chains of command and our agencies’ goals and priorities. In the face of change, my best advice is to maintain a sense of pride in your work, keep things in perspective, and find ways to support your colleagues and ask for their support in return. Here are… Read more »
As government communicators, we’re best serving the public when we’re thinking about our customers as smaller groups — defined, just for example, by geographic location, specific needs or languages spoken — and communicating directly with those groups. Simply put, our services are more impactful when our audiences are understood.
To connect with your customers, it’s important to get out of your comfort zone. Now, I’m not advising you to do anything foolhardy. I’m talking about using communications tactics that might feel a bit risky and experimental.
Don’t think of internal communication as “I need to tell you what’s going on” or “You need to provide feedback via this survey.” If you really want to communicate with employees, it must be a dialogue.
Don’t forget a core set of customers that you interact with every day: Your agency’s employees.
Whether you’re trying to reach a large selection of people or specific groups, you become much more effective when working with intermediaries. These trusted voices can connect with your audience locally and help connect them to services you deliver.
How do we reach the young and mobile, the recently deployed, and the skeptical? At the Census Bureau we have a few outreach strategies that may also work for other government agencies.