1. Community Engagement Making the most of your website as a community engagement platform
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2. 6 Stages of Digital Community Engagement
Assessment Score
Our digital engagement assessment will give you a score on how engaging your website is. Using the modules we’ll discuss today, you will be able to advance your score. You should strive to get your site at a level 4 or higher.
At its core, its about online expectation – from your local government staff to your constituents to the influencers and visitors to your community
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3. Why is community engagement on the homepage important?
One aspect of successful, sustainable digital government is to align initiatives with the intent, expectations and preferences of digital citizens. It’s an important move for government operations because digital interactions save money – they cost 80 percent less than non-digital interactions.
The options must be available and obvious so users will take advantage of them before picking up the phone and calling you.
A majority of users believe that the ability to interact digitally with government would encourage them to be more engaged with government and thought it would make government more transparent.
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4. Home Page Presence Crucial aspects of homepage:
The first step to successful community engagement is to view your website as a platform for your users to interact with their government and accomplish tasks and transactions quickly.
Crucial aspects of homepage:
Variety of graphic buttons for quick and clear reference of action oriented items
Online payments, citizen issue reporting and agendas
Jobs
Facebook, Twitter and Community Voice presence
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5. Home Page Presence Important Graphics to Consider:
Clients that have a notify me graphic have 11% more use by site users than those that don’t have a graphic.
If your site users don’t know it’s an option, they won’t take advantage of it. Get the most from Community Voice by offering a graphic.
A client reported a 62% drop off in phone calls, s and office visits once they added a request tracker graphic to their homepage.
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6. Accept online requests for service
Digital government solutions are a reality for government operations, and digital citizens are more than ready for them.
Save time and money by offering the services online. Users will no longer need to call, or come by the office to report or request a service.
Users are no longer constrained to your business hours – they can submit requests on their own time, at any hour of the day.
For governments, going digital is a means to work more efficiently and effectively.
But don’t forget, the best digital programs give citizens what they want, too!
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7. Citizen Request Tracker
Use the Citizen Request Tracker to not only allow your users to submit concerns online, but maintain, track and handle those requests all through the administrative side of your site.
Benefits Include:
Open line of communication between you and the user
iPhone and Facebook application for additional user convenience
Statistics reporting
Organized and consistent way to handle requests
Ability to create internal only categories for web help, maintenance, etc.
Users will be able to keep track of current and closed requests
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8. Citizen Request Tracker
Ticket structure allows you to:
Populate a Google map with the problem location
Add comments internally or to the user
Print work order
Print history
Associate other requests
Increase Efficiency:
Current clients have reported a 62% drop off in calls and office visits after using CRT™.
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9. ” “ Allow your community to voice their ideas
The more that governments understand their citizens’ needs, preferences and intent, the more relevant digital programs will be. This includes strong communications efforts focused on educating citizens about the availability of and how to access these services.
Ultimately, community engagement is about dialogue. It’s about citizens sharing their individual and collective voice. It’s about sharing your voice in why government matters. ” “
Possum? Check. Living? Yep. Turned the trashcan on its side. Walked home. Good night, sweet possum.
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10. Community Voice
Providing a service like this on your site is important for involving your community, and lets them share input on their own time. With this tool, you’ll receive valuable information from your site users and keep them coming back to the site frequently.
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11. Community Voice How it works:
This module is completely geared toward community engagement and government transparency – two hot topics right now!
How it works:
Post topics on general or specific areas you are wanting citizen input on. You can have as many topics as you want.
Once you create a topic, the general public will be able to go in and post ideas, comments and vote freely.
Users get points for activity and the top 10 most active users will be presented on the leaderboard.
This module is great for surveys, information about the website or even specifics like new community additions.
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12. Community Connection How it works:
Give your community the choice to express their opinions and ideas, while engaging with other community members. This module will help drive traffic back to your site and allows you to receive valuable input from your site users.
How it works:
Different from Community Voice in the way that your users are choosing what they want to start groups and discussions on.
Users can create groups that others can join, and each group can have multiple discussions happening at once.
There is an activity feed for the module and each group so it’s easy to see who’s voted or commented and which users are most active.
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13. Community Connection
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14. Use Social Media Tools
GovLoop’s Five Mega Trends with Social Media and Government
The Cry for Transparency
Technology is enabling a new wave of sharing
Volumes of documents are now available at visitor finger tips
Citizen Engagement
“The opportunity of social media and government is not economic or technological. It’s emotional.”
Encourages active participation
Humanizing Government
“Social media is not a second website, it’s a community”
Citizens expect it
Crisis Management
Fastest way to get weather warnings and alerts out
Provide quick informative statements reaching many at once
Real-time Response (and mobile)
With a tweet, post or text, potholes, street lights and other issues are being reported and fixed.
Answer questions quickly that are publicly visible for everyone else that’s curious too.
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15. Social Media CONNECTING PEOPLE
The use of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter have become expected by people of all walks of life. There is no general audience as these social media tools have grown and become extremely user friendly and easily accessed.
By utilizing Facebook to present information to your site users, they will be constantly updated and seeing those posts when they are looking at their newsfeed. This is a quick way for the user to stay updated and an extremely easy way for you to reach out to the community.
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16. Social Media
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17. Online Payments
It’s about 24/7 access and convenience – not just for government employees and elected officials – but from all the stakeholders that have a voice in making your community thrive.
Users can make payments when it fits into their schedules – not standard business hours.
Less phone calls and office traffic trying to make payments.
Whether you’re a city, village, township, county or province – expectations have changed and are changing. People demand engaged communications, government transparency, online transactions and the opportunity to hear and be heard – that is today’s reality.
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18. Online Payments Importance Aspects of Online Payments
Online payments are an expected part of today’s web world. We pay our rent, phone bill, car insurance and even do our banking online. How would you react if you no longer had the option to pay these services online?
Importance Aspects of Online Payments
Options! Even if you don’t think people will use it, giving them the option to is important.
Homepage Presence – You’ll need to promote the fact that you accept payments online so users will know they are able to take advantage of the service.
When going digital, governments must take a holistic look at existing processes and build online services with a differentiated approach that takes into account, and full advantage of, the entire spectrum of benefits of the online channel.
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19. Jobs Module Benefits Include:
Jobs are always in the top 5 most searched words on government websites. This tells us two things:
1. People are coming to your site for jobs
2. They can’t find them!
Module Benefits Include:
Quick, consistent way to post jobs
Gives your users the ability to apply online, creating a profile that will fill their information in automatically
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