Digital Communications

[Katarina HongParticipant]

These days, you don’t walk over to your friend’s place to have a conversation; you text, email or call on your smartphone. You do most things with mobile devices and communicate with people digitally. The same goes for government agencies.

Knowing this, then, how are you supposed to successfully engage with citizens and ensure they have a great experience across these mobile and digital devices?

GovDelivery recently came out with an infographic, Digital Government Engagement Challenges & Priorities 2016, that can help you figure it out. Government communicators took a survey and laid out their challenges and priorities for 2016. By knowing these trends, you can improve how citizens are engaging with you and how you can improve the citizen experience.

Let’s start off with government communicator’s priorities. 82% of organizations say they’re focusing on providing a better citizen experience. Clearly, it’s a top priority. Organizations are turning towards advanced digital solutions to create better experiences. “60% want more online services like self-service transactions and on-demand learning,” the infographic states. Next up? How agencies want to improve service delivery efficiency with automation and simplified processes. After these two trends, agencies want to focus on building great transparency by making data more available.

Now that we know what the government’s priorities are, let’s talk about what organizations are focusing on. Government communicators want to focus on three digital channels. The largest channel is website investments. This means agencies are turning advanced digital solutions to make their websites user-friendly. You need to meet your customer’s needs by looking at your website like a citizen. The second channel is social media. Social media has become a way to release and receive information in a quick, direct manner. Lastly, government communicators want to prioritize emails. Email is a great and common way to send out information. You need to make sure your agency is sending out relevant and useful information, which you can do by looking at your data and feedback by citizens to make sure it’s what they want to read. With government organizations focusing on these three digital channels, they’ll be able to make a big impact.

Even knowing these priorities, challenges – like lack of budget or resources – still exist in government. These affect initiatives like open data – due to lack of budgets and resources, only 30% of those who took the survey are able to host or publish their own open data. 41% don’t event know what their open data initiatives are.

But if you can identify what you want and your challenges, it is possible to successfully achieve your goals. Government agencies are seeing these trends and want to improve their digital presence. By improving their digital devices, they are focusing on citizen experience as well. Once they overcome their challenges and stay focused, they can see results to their hard work and successfully engage with their citizens digitally.

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