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2018 Benchmark Report is Out Today

How does my agency’s comms strategy stack up against its peers?

In another era, this would be a hard to answer. But in modern digital government, every digital message opened, website navigation tracked or social media follower added is something that can be measured.

At Granicus, we encourage our government partners to frequently monitor metrics to make sure their message is breaking through—and if it isn’t, to experiment by making changes (and measuring some more!). But we know that metrics are useless if there’s nothing to benchmark them against. After all, is a 25 percent open rate good or bad? Does the fact that a public works agency has a higher subscriptions per subscriber rate than a housing agency even matter?

Today, we’re releasing the 2018 Benchmark Report to help answer those questions—and quite a few more. The Benchmark Report, now in its third year, is based on data from the govDelivery Communications Cloud over the past year and allows government agencies to compare themselves to similar organizations by size (federal, state, local, and UK), as well as by vertical (agriculture, public works, education, labor, etc). Because govDelivery is the only government-focused communications solution, this deep dive into public sector data exists nowhere else.

Among the findings in this year’s Benchmark Report:

  • Government Email Leads the Way: Emails sent by the public sector regularly meet or exceed private and nonprofit sector benchmark metrics. Granicus found an overall open rate for government emails of 21 percent, a rate that has remained constant over the past three years. That compares to approximately 18 percent for the private sector and 16 percent for the nonprofit sector.
  • Email Engagement is Trending Upward: The median engagement rate increased slightly to 47 percent this year, compared to 45 percent in 2017, meaning that government communications teams are better targeting and accurately messaging to citizens needs.
  • Twitter Gets Shared Most Often, YouTube Gets Clicked: Government agencies have realized the power of social media to convey messages and deliver customer service. Granicus benchmark research finds that links to Twitter were the most likely to be shared in government emails, however, YouTube links were the most likely to be clicked, clearly demonstrating the power of video.
  • The Future is Mobile: The 2018 benchmark analysis revealed that half of all traffic to government websites comes from mobile devices, a number that has increased nearly 10 percent since 2016 is only expected to grow in the future; yet, most government websites are not mobile enabled.
  • Strong SEO is Critically Important: Sixty percent of traffic comes from organic search, so the continued emphasis on search engine optimization is vital.

The report provides tips for improving metrics, as well as a case study for each that focuses on an organization that we think is doing something particularly well.

Ready to see how your organization compares to other agencies? Download the 2018 Benchmark Report today!