Welcome to Inform! Engage! Inspire!
My goal is to find creative ideas to improve the ways that local governments communicate with their constituents through the strategic use of technology and design. My hope is that other government communicators will join in and help me discover the best tools and techniques to meet the challenging task of creating effective communications.
The Premise
What do constituents need from local government communicators?
At a minimum, your residents need to be informed—they want to know the latest recycling procedures, when they can water their lawn, what the tax rate will be next year—knowledge that helps them understand shared expectations for the community and how to use government services effectively.
Beyond merely getting information, they need to be engaged too.
They want to be part of a conversation. They don’t want to be just talked to, they want to be listened to as well. They want to be heard and know that they’ve been heard and see changes because of what they’ve said.
Even better, they’d like you to ask them what they want. And then to develop plans to attain what they want. Then execute those plans. Then go back and show them what you’ve accomplished.
Many of your constituents are looking for ways to get involved, to be a part of the future of their community, and they need us to help them plug in.
We should inform the community and we can help individuals engage. But we also have the opportunity to inspire.
We can create opportunity for others to make the community a better place. We can elevate what is good in our communities and address the obstacles that are holding us back.
We can help create and achieve a shared vision.
This goes beyond providing information and an opportunity to participate in what’s happening now. It’s about creating what our communities will become.
The Challenge
Today everyone is an expert media consumer. Each person spends their day soaking in a stew of manufactured experiences, strategic messages, and world-class design. They can sniff out junk in a second.
To be heard, local governments must compete with all of the content available on television, radio, the web, iPods, smartphones, PDAs, magazines, books, video games, podcasts, and on and on. Not only must we compete with content across all these media, we must do it within these media. We need to be where our constituents are, and we need to be visible when we’re there.
This is not an easy task. It requires a strategic vision, great design, and an authentic voice.
There is some brilliant work being done in government today, as each year’s 3CMA Savvy Award applications clearly demonstrate. But there is also quite a bit that is amateurish, poorly designed, poorly written, and executed in a strategic vacuum. And that is just wasted effort.
I believe it is up to each of us to raise the level of professionalism in the local government communications industry so that all government communications reach their intended audiences.
If we want to be taken seriously, then we must be serious about delivering high quality, effective, and efficient communications.
To do that we must be knowledgeable, skilled, and unafraid. We must be the thought leaders in our organizations, the ones that speak up for quality and creativity.
Communications should be a core competency of every local government—it should get appropriate resources and careful thought; it should be strategically managed and measured.
The content has to be honest, forthright, and authentic. It’s about transparency and inclusion, not spin or obfuscation. We have a duty to our constituents to serve them first.
If we don’t communicate well, other voices will drown us out—the local paper, television news, and bloggers—and tell our story for us.
We should be telling our own story. It’s a story our constituents would love to hear. It’s a story that can inspire.
About the Blog’s Name
The title of my blog came from a strategic planning workshop with my communications team in Coral Springs. We spent some time brainstorming an update to our departmental mission, which had been:
To enhance effective communication between the City and its customers through creative strategies that promote, position and impact City goals and services.
Nothing wrong with that, but we didn’t really find any inspiration in it either. It failed to create a vision of where we wanted to go and set us free to be truly creative. It was really just a declaration of the status quo.
We spent a few minutes listing words that described what we believed our role was, our vision for ourselves. Then we whittled that list down to the three most important ideas, which we would base our new mission statement on.
And that’s when we saw it. We didn’t need to craft a statement. We just needed the vision.
Inform.
Engage.
Inspire.
Something to shoot for.
