Posts By Jeffrey Levy

New Job, New Challenges!

After 21 years at EPA, I’m heading to new issues and challenges at US Citizenship and Immigration Services.  I’ll be the chief of the E-Communications Division, working on web and social media. My last day will be November 26, the day before Thanksgiving. I’ve had some amazing experiences here, and a good chunk of myRead… Read more »

Data point for banners/carousels: numbers vs. text for navigating among banners

On April 23, we launched our new home page design (http://www.epa.gov). Among other changes, we reworked our banners at the top. It used to look like this screen shot: To change banners, you clicked the numbers. Heat maps showed that people did use the numbers to move among the banners, and other analytics confirmed peopleRead… Read more »

EPA & Social Media: What We’re Using, What We’re Thinking About

EPA leapt into the social media world in July 2007 with our first blog post. Ever since, we’ve been working to expand our options. That’s been greatly helped by the terms of service that GSA has negotiated on behalf of all federal agencies (most agreements contain clauses we can’t accept as federal agencies for variousRead… Read more »

Why in the World Am I Still in Gov’t?

It sucks to be in the federal gov’t right now, at least on paper. Furloughs and pay freezes, lousy public attitudes towards people who’ve dedicated themselves to helping others, helplessly watching as political battles rage, etc. As for the public (as a whole, not individual people), they’ll never fully appreciate us or how hard weRead… Read more »

An EPA social media success: ongoing participatory photo project

I get asked regularly for successful examples of using social media, so here’s one. Forty years ago, EPA hired photographers to capture our world, with a special focus on environmental issues. That was the Documerica project. For the past two years, EPA has invited everyone around the world to repeat that effort, sharing photos withRead… Read more »

New EPA Home Page

I’m lucky enough to lead EPA’s Office of Web Communications. I’ve written a lot about our social media efforts, but another one of our roles is to manage EPA’s home page. We redo it from time to time, and this is one of those times. Our effort started a couple of months ago with aRead… Read more »