Trending Up – What Works For Government Outreach?

Matching the message to the medium is a key component for effective outreach. What else makes the cut?

Wednesday, GovDelivery hosted an event on the Power of Reach in government, on how your communications can engage stakeholders to take action – online or offline – to truly drive mission value for your organization.

And as part of the event, GovDelivery assembled an all-star panel of experts:

• Cameron Brenchley, U.S. Department of Education
• Alan Levy, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
• Kent Politsch, USDA Farm Service Agency

According go the panel, what are the top government trends?

• Big Data: “Data is big for us, but identifying how much data is available is incredibly taxing,” said Brenchley. “It is hard to figure out just how many data sets we have. Being able to open up the data and allow the public to use has been a priority for us. We hold ‘data jams,’ where we encourage people to develop apps and programs based on our data. We don’t have app developers at the Education Department, we don’t have money to pay for them, but when we host a ‘data jam’ we can get apps developed for us at no charge.”
• Responsive Design: “Responsive is design is key,” said Brenchley. “Making sure our information is viewable on any device is essential. Ed.gov should be responsive in a few months.”
• Governance: “One of my concerns is we have gotten lost in the fervor of the communications,” said Politsch. “I am afraid it has become a little chaotic. The concern is governance. We need to make communications become the useful tool that it can be. How can we get it back to the people element? Governance is a critical factor.”
• Mobile: “Externally one of the biggest goals we have had is getting FDIC mobile by the end of the year,” said Levy. “We have seen in analytics a growth in those users who are coming to FDIC.gov via anything but PCs.”
• Analytics: “I am getting so much information from so many different sources that it is hard to put it together,” said Levy. “ One of the things we are always concentrating on is finding synergy with all the numbers that are coming across my desk, and then making decisions based on that synergy.”
• Saving Money: “By law we have to communicate with ranchers and farmers on a monthly basis. We were doing it on paper, but they told us we had to stop spending money,” said Politsch. “So we cut out the distribution of paper. We are in the process of converting information to mobile. So that when a farmer is on his tractor he can get the information he needs to make the right decision. We were able to save 3 million dollars.”

>>>> You can find all the Power of the Reach tour stops here.