Page 60 - FCW, March 2017

FCW Perspectives Sustaining citizen
engagement
The tools for figuring out what end users want are better than ever, but acting on those insights is still a challenge
Citizen engagement is part science and part art. Agencies increasingly crunch user data and A/B test site designs, yet truly connecting with end users requires skills and mindsets that can remain elusive.
On Feb. 22, FCW gathered a cross- section of citizen engagement experts to explore what’s working, where the obstacles persist and what to expect during the Trump administration.
The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution. (See Page 63 for a list of participants.)
Analytics are important, but only the start
As analytics take hold across govern- ment, agencies are learning how to tease citizens’ intent out of all that
data. Several participants said social media has been essential to bringing that picture into sharper focus.
“I’ve run my agency’s website since 1995,” one official said, and until recently basic page views were the cen- tral statistic, though not a very informa- tive one. “OK, you’ve got page views,” he said. “We know this particular web page got looked at a lot, but what did people do with it?”
By monitoring social media, the offi- cial said, agencies can finally begin to answer that question. “For as long as we’ve been trying to figure out, ‘How do we engage people?’ now we can,” he said. “We can actually see it.”
Yet that data on its own is of lim- ited value, other participants noted. Too many agencies don’t think enough
about who really needs their services, and they define their customer as sim- ply “the taxpayer” or “the American people.”
“It could be the entire U.S. popula- tion,” one participant said, “but when you really think hard about who you’re serving, you need to do some kind of segmentation and then really under- stand their specific needs.”
That’s true even when the target audience — veterans or students, for instance — is clear, others said.
Engagement, one participant said, “is ultimately about access. I think of it simply as part and parcel of providing services better to the public. In order to do that, you have to know who they are, and you have to engage with them and have a two-way rapport rather than
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March 2017 FCW.COM