Page 24 - GCN, April/May 2018

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT
A Conversation with
BERNETTA REESE
What approach does the
Agriculture Department take to citizen engagement?
One of Secretary Sonny Perdue’s top priorities is to make USDA one of the most effective, efficient departments for citizen engagement. All our agencies have websites, and a lot of our sites — including Farmers.gov and USDA.gov — focus specifically on our customers.
And social media is a big part of it. For the first time ever, our secretary has his own Twitter handle, @SecretarySonny, which has grown to 34,000 followers since it started last year. It’s the voice of the secretary, and it highlights everything he’s doing, where he’s been and who he’s talking to.
Through IT modernization, we’re looking at the tools we have and will find out what else we need to improve on engaging with citizens.
We also did a redesign of USDA.gov
in March 2017. Our redesigned site has a feedback box, and we read all those emails and prioritize them. We have to make sure the funding is there and that the suggestions make sense. It’s often everybody rolling up their sleeves and volunteering to step in.
How did you go about planning and redesigning USDA.gov?
We wanted to make it easier for people
to quickly know what’s happening across the department, so we added a “USDA in
BERNETTA REESE
Digital Manager, Agriculture Department
USDA’s digital manager talks about how to make citizen engagement the focus of digital services
Social media is absolutely necessary because that’s where people are. That’s where news and information are being shared.
Social media is absolutely necessary because that’s where people are. That’s where news and information are being shared. It’s a lot more engaging, it’s a
lot more real-time, and it’s a lot of fun. Websites are important as our centralized information point where records are stored and where we direct folks, and social media is complementary.
How do you find out what customers want from USDA, and how do you use that information?
We have feedback mechanisms on our websites and social media feeds, including mailboxes, phone numbers and comment forms. We have them on Farmers.gov so our farmers and ranchers can tell us how we’re doing.
Action” section. We added ways for people to sign up for email updates from any page. And we incorporated the U.S. Web Design
System, which introduced us to more intuitive designs.
This is part of a strategic effort to improve on digital communications across USDA, strengthen collaboration with all USDA agencies and expand our digital capabilities. Our goals were to highlight more social
and engaging content, put it at the public’s fingertips, make better use of our digital real estate, improve site searches and information architecture, and have better viewing from any device. The site is built on a Drupal platform for more flexibility in content management, faster posting and multiple ways to share feedback.
We completed content-mapping tasks,
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