Nottingham City Council Web strategy: how to become the site of choice for local residents By Pete Stevens – GOSS Interactive

2 Agenda Objectives Implementation Results Future

3 Website drivers Information seeking Rising expectations Residents Self-service (NI14) Engagement Positive messages Council Local and hyper-local newspapers BBC East Midlands/ITV Central- East Competition Web 2.0 Cost effective technology 60,943,912 UK residents online Trends

Nottingham City Council online objectives My Nottingham to become the place for information and services Website: Provide easy access to council and non-council information Provide easy self-service tools Create an engaging environment with “stickability” Off site: Make the site discoverable Push content to Social Media sites Publicise the site offline 4

Driving traffic to your site 5 Your website Search Social Media Offline marketing Offsite marketing

Tips for content success Put the thing that people want to do on the homepage Don’t explain what your site is for Make the process simple You are taking your customers time – make their life easy It is not a murder mystery A link is a promise Gerry McGovern 6

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User personas City Centre Worker “Excellence comes from innovation.” Name: Jonathan Hull Age: 37 Employment: East Midlands trains Job title: IT Manager Information needs: IT/Marketing info What’s on and going out Social networking Notts Forest FC 8

User personas Secondary School teacher “Bringing culture to kids.” Name: Clair Wells Age: 41 Employment: Fernwood School Job title: English and Art history teacher Information needs: What’s on (art and theatre) Teaching resources Bees 9

Driving traffic to your site 10 Your website Search Social Media Offline marketing Offsite marketing

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Nottingham on Google Google lists 36,300 page for site: 13

How Google works – Google view 14

How Google works – user view 50% of searchers are using key phrases with three words or longer 30% of users search with two word phrases 13% search with one word key phrases [Source: e-consultancy] So: Embed relevant key words into your content, but not at the expense of meaning and readability. Your message should be crafted around what people are searching for. 15

16 Daily visits Bounce rate (come to the site and leave immediately) Average time on site Sources (where visitors come from) Popular pages (where visitors go)

Results (Population 264,000) March ,427 visits 106,668 unique visits 641,477 page views Traffic sources 60% search 21% referring sites 19% direct October ,200 visits 159,612 unique visits 921,405 page views Traffic sources 57% search 26% referring sites 16% direct %

Awards and acolades Silver award at the LG Communications Reputation Award ceremony in the Digital Media category “The winning entries provide first rate examples of how to build reputations, showing the importance of a strategic approach, clear objectives and creativity.“ Edward Welsh, Programme Director, Media and Campaign, LGA 18

Future ideas What does it enable? –Single sign on for the web –Login once What makes it special? –No-one owns it –Open –Free –Extensible 19

...Intranet Instant messenger, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in a company environment - using and building on... GOSS iCM Core functionality: project teams and pages 20

Any questions?