4 Easy Steps to Boost Citizen Engagement

Scott Burns — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 16:41:31 -0400

At the top of nearly every public sector organization’s priority list is how to better engage the citizens it serves. Boosting stakeholder engagement was rated the highest communications objective for 2014 among nearly 40 percent of government respondents in a survey by GovDelivery, a digital communications service provider.

Communications that can drive stakeholders to engage with an organization’s mission is a critical factor. This is the case regardless of the mission itself, whether an organization like the Federal Emergency Management Agency is trying to drive citizens to prepare for a natural disaster or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is encouraging people to get their flu shots.

GovDelivery has collected many valuable citizen engagement tips that apply to organizations of all sizes and across all levels of government and put together a checklist. Here are four steps that can help your organization reach more people than ever before and drive those people to take action.

1. Step Back and Establish Goals

For the most successful communications, you and your team have to start by working backwards toward a goal. Think about the top one to three things you are trying to accomplish with your messages. Do you want people to go to your website? Download a new app? Make healthier food decisions? Volunteer locally? Whatever it is, it’s critical to make sure your messaging strategy is constructed with that goal in mind.

2. Offer Relevant Messages and Topics

Are you offering options for your stakeholders to sign up for specific topics that interest them? Do you communicate with those people according to the topics they signed up for? Most public sector agencies have many different audiences they need to reach. If you’re a health organization, the public is going to be interested in different topics than health administrators or partner medical companies. Respect those differences by delivering relevant information to specific audiences, and you will improve stakeholder satisfaction and engagement.

3. Take Out the Red Pen

When your stakeholders are trying to read a message on a mobile phone (which a growing number of them are) or in between meetings, what they need is a clean, clear design that is easily digestible. So take out the red pen and start slashing. To make your content easier to digest, cut down the text and increase the font size. Add white space, especially around images, links and buttons, so they are easier to click when read on a mobile device.

4. Capitalize on Targeted Messaging

Anytime someone interacts with your organization’s online services, portals or applications you have an opportunity to employ targeted messaging, a message that is personalized to that person’s interaction (sometimes called triggered or transactional messaging). A targeted message is the difference between an airline sending a general email to its subscriber list about a “special fare sale” versus the airline sending you a personalized message to “check in for your flight.” Targeted messages are more likely to drive engagement because the message is relevant, anticipated and personal. You can jump-start your targeted messages by personalizing a welcome or confirmation email to get them further involved in your programs.

Scott Burns is CEO and co-founder of GovDelivery, a cloud-based digital communications provider that helps government organizations connect with more people and get those people to take action. Read more on the latest in government communications and citizen engagement at www.reachthepublic.com.

(Image via Camilo Torres/Shutterstock.com)

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4 Things Every Government Communicator Should Know

Scott Burns — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 09:00:00 -0400

The foundation of successful government communications has always been the ability to effectively share information, provide solutions, and reach citizens and stakeholders with information they want and need. In the past, communicators honed the skills needed to organize interviews, create press releases, send correspondence and provide information for radio or TV. But in a digital era, with email, text messaging and social media at the core of how we communicate, government communicators are finding they need to keep up with a faster pace of information and adapt to a constantly growing and changing landscape of tools and platforms.

In working with more than 1,000 public sector organizations of all levels worldwide, we’ve partnered with countless government communicators. Through those experiences, we’ve seen the most successful government communicators employ strategies and tactics necessary to reach and spark conversations with citizens, subscribers, friends and fans on an ever-increasing number of platforms. We thought we’d share some essential strategies and tactics that today’s government communicator can use to create meaningful connections on digital platforms.

1. Provide Specific, Customizable Topics

If you’re anything like our clients, you’re creating a lot of content. You’re constantly updating web pages and blogs, drafting press releases, and working on articles or stories. What we’ve found is that the most successful government communicators are able to distill the content they write into specific topics to which citizens and stakeholders can then subscribe. By offering specific topics or feeds, such as road closures in a specific neighborhood or school updates or alerts on food recalls, citizens and stakeholders have the power to choose what kind of information they want to receive. This allows these individuals to customize the information they receive. They are more likely to subscribe to granular information of interest than a broad newsletter from your agency.

2. Reach 50 Percent More of Your Stakeholders

Every organization’s starting point is different, but an effective government communications team needs the ability to set and reach measurable targets for subscriber engagement. One key metric that every government communicator should be tracking is the number of people he or she can reach. To that end, an essential strategy to build and strengthen is the ability to increase your organization’s outreach by 50 percent or more. If you are currently communicating with only 1,000 stakeholders via an e-newsletter, imagine the impact your organization could have by being able to reach 1,500 stakeholders using multiple channels.

The number of people you connect with ties directly to the impact you can have on meeting mission goals. One very simple way to significantly increase your subscriber base is to make it easy for citizens to subscribe. An easy, but often overlooked tactic, is to put links to sign up for updates everywhere: on your website’s home page, high traffic web pages, blogs, and social media profiles, as multiple gateways to information and content for citizens.

3. Drive Online Self-Service & Transactions to Meet Mission Goals

Moving beyond mass communication with large audiences to deliver personalized, one-to-one messages that encourage online activities or transactions can help government organizations meet mission goals, save money and potentially increase revenue. With people more willing than ever to receive bank statements online and pay utility bills through government portals, one-to-one messages are critical to driving the use of online self-service portals and transactional activities in general.

Adoption of online service activities can be increased by providing specific and clear calls-to-action throughout your message to let stakeholders know what activity they can take either online or offline.

4. Network Effectively with Other Government Entities

In the public sector, agencies can work together on common interests and goals. By partnering with other government entities to cross-promote content, organizations can simultaneously increase their outreach and drive engagement with very little additional time, effort or cost. Work with organizations that seek to reach similar audiences by topic, geography or both. By cross-promoting one another’s subscription topics, both organizations can dramatically increase digital outreach to people who have never visited their website but are interested in specific topics.

Organizations that use cross-promotion effectively can increase new sign-ups by 50 percent or more. Try showing users options of “Other topics/newsletters you might be interested in from other organizations” and ask those organizations to do the same for your most popular subscription topics.

Citizens and stakeholders need information, either to answer questions they have or provide insight into concerns, but they may not know that government can help them find that information. Public sector communications professionals can help. With a diverse digital strategy and tactics, they can effectively communicate valuable information to stakeholders, helping their organization meet mission goals and ultimately proving organizational value to stakeholders and the public.

Scott Burns is the CEO of GovDelivery, the leading provider of public sector cloud-based communication solutions, provides a massively scalable communications ecosystem that transforms the way public sector organisations, of all sizes, attract, inform, and engage stakeholders.

Image via pio3/Shutterstock.com

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Government Executive - Authors - Scott Burns

4 Easy Steps to Boost Citizen Engagement

4 Things Every Government Communicator Should Know