It's Time to Measure the Impact of Better Communication (GovDelivery + ACSI/Foresee Results)

By Scott Burns, CEO & co-Founder, GovDelivery

Why does communication matter in your organization?  What impact does it have?  You always need to be thinking about your impact, but in these tight budget times, it's important to get the facts on the impact of communication into the dialogue when your organization is discussing priorities.

This topic is so pressing for our clients that I want to call attention to our friends and new partners at ForeSee Results who have some incredible facts about website and communication effectiveness that will transform how you think about and make the case in your organization for the importance of effective communication.

FACTS MATTER

High citizen satisfaction with federal websites is a key driver of desired future behaviors, saving taxpayers money and improving the
government’s relationship with its citizens. When compared to less
satisfied site visitors (scoring below 70), highly satisfied website
visitors (80 and higher) are:

• 52% more likely to return to a federal government website;
• 79% more likely to recommend the website;
• 54% more likely to trust the government agency;
• 80% more likely to use the website as their primary resource instead of using more costly channels like call centers;
• 50% more likely to participate in government by expressing their thoughts.

You can read their recent quarterly report on government website satisfaction here.  While there is not as much data on local and international government, I am certain that these facts hold across the public sector. 

IMPROVE ENGAGEMENT, MAKE SERVICES MORE EFFECTIVE, SAVE $$$

Imagine citizens that are 50% more likely to engage or 80% more likely to use the Web instead of call / visit to get needs addressed by your agency, city, or county?  The fact is that better communication impacts some of the most important metrics in you organization and can have an amazing financial impact.

I'm really proud that GovDelivery has recently partnered with ForeSee Results (learn more) to allow our shared clients to see within their ForeSee Results reporting how proactive digital communication through GovDelivery is impacting citizen satisfaction.  You'll now be able to tell if visitors coming back to your website after receiving proactive messages via email (and eventually the other channels we support)  are any more satisfied with their experience than users that reach your website through other means.  This will create exciting opportunities to measure and improve proactive communication.

The idea for this partnership came from several amazing civil servants including Janice Nall (formerly at CDC and now at OMB) who explained at our user forum on the Open Government Directive how tracking the impact of social media on citizen satisfaction and trust was helping CDC quantify the impact of its social and digital media investments.

Janice led the effort at CDC to make better use of metrics and publicize the metrics.  Along with Janet Stevens (CIO of the Food Safety & Inspection Service at USDA and one of our first federal clients) she was also one of the first to bring to our attention several years ago that CDC's use of GovDelivery was positively impacting CDC's ACSI scores.  (Listen to a brief clip of her presentation at that time.)  Other agencies have reported similar impact, and now we're in a position to quantify the impact at a more granular level that we hope will allow or clients to continue to improve to have even more impact.

Please get in touch (either through this form or on GovLoop) if you are using GovDelivery and/or ForeSee Results today and want to take advantage of this new way to measure the impact of your communication efforts.