Government organizations face high expectations for transparency, citizen engagement, and impactful outreach. Further, government entities are looking for behaviors and actions from their audiences. They need their audience to cast votes, give testimony, complete forms, and provide feedback, to name a few.
With today’s vast array of digital communication opportunities, delivering consistent, focused, and meaningful messaging can be tricky. After all, the world of communications tools, technologies, and techniques has become an incredibly complex and ridiculously fast-moving environment. As you start to build your digital outreach plan the biggest hurdle is often overcoming the deer-in-headlights effect that quickly takes hold from the overwhelming rush of tasks, actions, data, algorithm changes, trending social platforms…and the list goes on ad nauseum.
It’s a dynamic landscape, true. But the elements of that landscape don’t necessarily change, as the basic elements of a child’s pictures of a landscape don’t change from drawing to drawing. They contain a sky, ground, plants (trees, flowers), and characters. Sometimes the sky has a sun or perhaps clouds; sometimes the ground is mountainous or completely flat; the flowers could be blue or yellow; and the characters might be a family or a dinosaur. The point is, there is an equation, that even a child has awareness of, to a landscape or scene. They just need to make decisions about the specific details, and as they develop a better understanding of the world, or learn about new possible details, their art will reflect what they think is important to their landscape.
Similarly, the communications landscape has a certain equation to it. You just need to make choices about the specific make-up of each element.
What does our landscape equation look like? Allow me a visual — have you ever encountered the trope in nearly all archeological or jungle themed action-packed films? The hero archeologist is trekking through the jungle, so close to his prize artifact (you know, the one that, if in the wrong hands, will destroy the world as we know it) and he must face his greatest fear (the fear of falling from a great height to his doom) and cross a questionably constructed rope bridge to reach his prize.
We’re going to start with that bridge and become expert architects of a well-constructed, reliable ROPE bridge that builds relationships and encourages your audience to journey across to engage with us on our side of the cavern.
R-O-P-E
Let’s break it down. Let’s look at the rope we’ll be using for our bridge. Our rope (hereafter referenced as our ROPE) is a four-strand cord, each strand representing a critical component of digital communications landscape. They are Rented, Owned, Paid, and Earned space.
Rented: This space is any place that you are producing or curating content on a platform that belongs to another organization. You are renting space on their network, but ultimately, they are the all-powerful landlords and they, not you, have control of the rules of play. Good rule of thumb, if you need to create a profile page, then you are renting space.
Owned: This space is where the magic happens (or at least should be happening). Your owned space is anything that you have control over, mainly, your website.
Paid: Your paid space encompasses digital advertising opportunities. This space continues to become more and more complex and crosses into other territories, particularly the rented arena.
Earned: The easiest way to think about earned space is to correlate it with public relations. However, it can get a little tricky to keep straight when you place the digital lens on it. In earned space, you are seeking to engage with another strategically beneficial person’s or entity’s audience to drive a behavior.
Each of these cord strands is an important component and driver of traffic to your own website. Even owned space drives traffic to itself through quality content, design and smart SEO.
Building Bridges With Your ROPE
The material is also an important element of our ROPE Bridge. We know our audience will feel a lot more comfortable crossing over a 100-ft drop when they see a steel rope as opposed to, say, yarn. When we think about materials, we’re specifically thinking about the tools enabling the construction of our architecturally-sound bridge. Artificial intelligence (AI), content management systems (CMS), editorial calendars, social media management systems, and Google Analytics, just to name a few, are all the tools to construct a trustworthy ROPE bridge.
A Unique Perspective
Okay, you have the puzzle pieces. Now it’s time to assemble, but before you do I want you to adjust your perspective. To this point, we’ve been evaluating each piece of the bridge and as you were visualizing it coming together, you were likely looking at the scope of the journey cliff-side to cliff-side.
That view is important, understanding the journey from one end to the finish helps you to pinpoint problem areas and build a strategy to course-correct. But you can only fully assess the performance of your bridge when you have an intimate understanding of who is crossing it. A bridge without people to cross it, even the most beautiful bridge, is kind of pointless.
I want you to stand on your side of the bridge and look across the chasm. When you do that, something really cool happens. There it is…your bullseye. Your target. That one amazing citizen (or buyer persona representing a target audience) that you’re building the bridge for.
If you can build your bridge with your mark in mind, building your bridge with the right elements working together becomes rather natural.
Elizabeth Nerland is a seasoned leader with over 20 years of experience currently serving as the Senior Director of Strategic Communications & Engagements for Chugach Government Solutions. Elizabeth has worked in a myriad of industries including government contracting, oil & gas, travel & tourism, finance, non-profit and education. She served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) teaching graduate and undergraduate marketing courses. She holds an MBA from UAA; a Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Arts (BSBA) in Marketing and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Corporate Communications from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.