No matter what level of government you work in, there are challenges related to communicating with the public. Driving engagement with limited resources can feel close to impossible.
In order to learn actionable ways to overcome government comms challenges, we brought together Shelly Klein, Customer Service Technologies Administrator of Hurst, Texas; Lauren McCanse, Digital Director in the Office of Governor Greg Abbott; and Andres Ramos, Director of Strategic Communications at the Texas Education Agency during Granicus’ recent Digital Engagement Day in Austin, Texas.
Here are a few things we learned:
Metrics are key to determining what is working with your communications strategy and what could use some improvement. However, it is important to go deeper and understand what exactly you are measuring instead of taking the numbers at face value.
For Ramos and the Texas Education Agency, metrics looked really good, but they were constantly contacted by administrators who were unaware of critical information. This problem indicated that they might not be measuring correctly. “In order to remedy this challenge, we had to reassess and discover what the right metrics for success were for our agency,” Ramos said.
For McCanse and the Office of Governor Greg Abbott, their biggest challenge was getting the right information to the right people. “We send out several emails a day to huge lists,” McCanse explained “However, we didn’t have the analytics and tools to break down those lists into segments until we started using Granicus.”
Once they started leveraging list segmentation, McCanse and her team were able to use different website forms to put people on different lists. Through this, she could start sending people the emails they wanted rather than inundating their inboxes with every email sent out.
The City of Hurst, Texas struggled with overall engagement. “We had to find a way to get the word out about our content that drove people to subscribe so they could keep getting the information they need,” Klein explained.
One audience they really wanted to engage with was potential pet adopters. Using the GovDelivery Communications Cloud, Klein and her team were able to send emails to animal service subscribers every time a new pet went up for adoption. These emails included everything a subscriber needed to know about the adoptable pet in a user-friendly layout. Through these efforts, Hurst saw 259 pets adopted and a 354 percent growth in subscribers.
Are you ready to start making your metrics matter and become a comms leader at your agency? The 2017 Benchmark Report: Insights for Mapping an Effective Digital Strategy is a good place to get started. Download to start monitoring and improving the metrics that matter.
