Welcome, GovLoopers! By now, we bet you’ve noticed the slick new look we’ve got around these parts. We hope you’re enjoying the more modern treatment — we know we are, and we’re very excited about it. But we realize that, as with any redesign, some things may be confusing to you, our incredibly valued community. Worry not. We might have gotten a face-lift, but the underlying spirit and functions are still the same.
Nevertheless, we wanted to help out long-time GovLoopers figure out where things are — and tell our new members about all the awesome things you may not even realize you can do. Ready for a quick tour of our rad features? Let’s get started.
BLOGGING
Like any good media site, GovLoop.com blogs — a lot. You can see our full blog here, and you’ll notice many of our pieces in featured in the top carousel. We write about many things — from event recaps, to career advice, to cybersecurity and beyond.
But did you know that you can blog, too? That’s right — anybody who’s a member of the community on GovLoop can add a community blog post. And we want you to add a lot! We’ll even feature the really good ones on our home page and in our newsletters.
Blogging for GovLoop is easy. First and foremost, make sure you’re signed in. Then simply go to the COMMUNITY dropdown tab in the main navigation and click BLOG. On this page you should now see a large “ADD A POST” button. Click the button and you will be directed to our post submission backend. Write your blog post in there (tips: case studies, career advice, and practical tips do best with our audience; we do not accept events, press releases, or other generic announcements), and it will be sent to our approval queue. We’ll then work to get it up to the site ASAP!
To see some excellent community blogging, make sure to check out our GovLoop Featured Bloggers. These are voices from government, writing about topics and issues that affect all of us. You’ll know it’s a post by them by the little “featured blogger” banner at the top.
RESOURCES
The resources we produce are a mainstay of GovLoop, and one of the things we hope you find most useful. We create dozens of resources a year, on everything from cloud computing, to mobile security, to citizen engagement, and beyond.
There are three main types of GovLoop resources:
Guides: We produce anywhere from 15-20 guides a year. These are publications that are 15-25 pages long, where we highlight best practices, case studies, and interviews on a variety of topics.The guides are written specifically for the public servant using real govie input, interviews and survey data from your peers. It’s almost like they’re by govies for govies! Recent guides includes one on Open Data, the Internet of Things, and the Future of Digital Public Services.
Research Briefs: These are shorter GovLoop publications, where we survey our community about a particular topic — say, big data — and incorporate those survey findings along with subject matter expert interviews to reveal larger trends and a picture of an issue impacting government workers.
Infographics: GovLoop is lucky enough to have an awesome in-house design team, who lay out all of our publications — and design some seriously amazing infographics to boot. Check them out, and learn some interesting information in a more visual manner.
One of the best parts about our new resources page? You can now filter by both type of resource and the subject, using the column of topics at the left and the row of resource types at the top. We hope now that you’ll be able to find any GovLoop resource on any topic in a matter of keystrokes.
Oh, and the other best thing about GovLoop resources? They’re all completely free for you to download.
TRAINING [ONLINE]
In addition to our free resources, the team here at GovLoop puts on about three to four online trainings per month. These cover everything from how to best leverage mobile technology to cybersecurity best practices to “virtual summits” – half-day long virtual summits (an upcoming one is all about state & local issues). Yup, these are free for you to attend, too — and our home page features a handy-dandy calendar of everything that’s upcoming.
Missed a training? No worries — we archive everything, and you can access previous trainings here under the “Archived” tab.
TRAINING [IN-PERSON]
For those of you that live in the Washington, D.C. metro area, you won’t want to miss GovLoop’s in-person training events. We host these every four to six weeks in the D.C. area, and we bring in government names of note to explain best practices on a variety of topics to you. And for every event you attend, you’ll get three CPEs. You can register for these in-person events here — just look for the little “in-person” line above them.
GROUPS
Groups are basically what they sound like — online groupings around a particular topic where you can chat with community members and GovLoop friends. They’re a great way to do some virtual networking, as well as get best practices and tips from your gov colleagues. Some of our most popular groups are the Government 2.0 Club; the Rock Your Resume! group; and Social Media for Government. Groups can be made private so it’s just you and the members you approve, or public so anyone can join.
You can search for groups to join here. Have an idea for a group? Create it by clicking here. Want to find out which of your groups are most recently active? Go to the My Groups tab, and sort by “last active.”
Looking for how to reach Groups? They’re under the Community tab in the navigation. Enjoy!
FORUMS
The forums are your place for more general discussions on anything you’re thinking about. Got a question on the job? Need career advice? Got a quick tip to share? Add it to the forums! You can get to the forums by clicking on the Community tab in the nav. We’ve got forum threads on budgeting, careers, job openings, community events & announcements, and lots more. The forums are your place to ask the community for general advice, share your advice about anything going on at your agency, or to promote your work.
Want to know what forums are most recently active? On the righthand sidebar of most pages throughout GovLoop.com, you can see the newest discussions from the forums happening right now. Additionally, you can go to the forums page and check under the “freshness” column for the timestamp of the last addition to each forum.
YOUR PROFILE & FRIENDS
It’s important to make sure your profile 1. is up to date with your career information 2. has a photo of you — it adds personality and credibility! To make updates in your profile, log in, then click on your name in the upper-righthand corner of GovLoop.com. Then, click on “profile” in the lefthand sidebar, and make text edits on the “edit” tab, or change your photo under “change avatar” tab.
You can also add friends through the GovLoop community to track what they’re up to and private message one another. To do that, go to Community → members, and search by name there. In our next update of the web site, we’ll be introducing advanced member search filters so you can better find people to connect with.
And finally, you can also now access personalized forum activity right from your profile. This makes it really easy to keep track of all the discussion threads from around the site that you are participating in.
And that’s that! Those are most of the new (and existing) capabilities of the new GovLoop.com – we hope you’ll take full advantage of them and continue to use GovLoop to learn, network, and share with our community. We appreciate having you here!
Still have questions or concerns? Drop them in our forum feedback thread.
Great new look! If you want to create a new blog, it’s kind of hard to figure out though. I guess there is no getting around the approval process for blog posts, but it feels kind of like you don’t trust your users. Also, it looks like all the featured blog posts are about data. Maybe you should change your name to GovData. Would like to see more personal interest stories, but that may be just me. Good job guys!