Citizen Engagement – start with the Citizen’s “hills,” explore and validate, and only then focus on moving forward with capabilities and solutions in combination with superior user experience and measureable business value.
| I had the benefit of attending two great events last week – both focusing on citizen engagement – but from totally different perspectives. | |
| In the first event– a monthly breakfast hosted by The Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) focused on “Enhancing Citizen Engagement and Outreach.” The panel reflected on many different perspectives on how citizen-focused programs are being planned, considered, and piloted at their agencies. | |
| It was great to hear about the Citizen-Centric approaches and plans. And the best quote of the day was when Nicole Callahan, Digital Engagement Strategist at Federal Student Aid (FSA), characterized her social media feedback program at the FSA as moving Level-10 angry citizens to Level-3 angry citizens – as let’s face it they are coming in angry – so lets have them leave less angry. | |
| Two themes still continued to be a challenge for these Agencies. | |
| First - measurement and determination of the “value” of Citizen satisfaction. For these agencies on the panel, success was defined as number of interactions (# of emails responded to at FSA, # of ideas generated at USAID, and # of website hits at US Census and USDA). In my observations to date - sheer volume of responses will likely not be enough to drive drastic changes in Citizen engagement. | |
| Second - these pilot programs were not yet driving (or being driven) by major systems of record or systems of engagement changes. Therefore success was somewhat limited given lack of change of processes and systems to be able to change the Citizen experience | |
| At the second event – The American Institute of Graphic Arts DotGovDesign provided a great dose of digital design – mixed with the latest thoughts on design thinking, Citizen-Centric interaction, and Agile/Quick Win implementations with the Citizen at the center of the initiative. | |
| Again – some great initial wins, and the focus on User (Citizen) Experience from the perspectives of social psychology, user centered design, campaigns/outreach, and others were fantastic. | |
| These wins are just the “low-hanging fruit” – providing an awesome renewed focus on the user experience. How can these efforts be extended to also drive major systems, process, and policy changes? How can we infuse new enabling technologies such as cognitive and analytics? How can we support the ecosystem of the citizen and move beyond the boundaries of a single agency? | |
| In the “Un-conference,” which I was privileged to host at DotGovDesign – I dug into this a bit – and got great feedback on a few points from the Citizen Perspective: | |
| The Citizen does not care about the agency boundary or even the agency mission – they care about the citizen experience across the “ecosystem” – which could include multiple agencies, state and local entities, and even commercial entities. | |
| The Citizen wants to have multiple channels to interact with this ecosystem - and in many cases the anonymity and ease of the digital channel is preferred. | |
| The Citizen wants this positive experience to span the lifecycle of Citizen Engagement Points (across attract, registration, application, enrollment, and on-going engagement) | |
| The Citizen wants to have his/her interests represented (the concept of a citizen advocate continued to ring positively with the group surveyed) | |
| So – what did I learn? The focus continues to need to be squarely on the Citizen problem – period. Design Thinking is a great way to identify these “hills,” and that only when these “hills” are addressed with 1) awesome Citizen experience, 2) clearly providing measureable value will Agencies likely fund and commit resources, and 3) implementing differentiating capabilities and technical solutions around the top pain points surfaced. | |
| So stay tuned as we continue our citizen-centric journey. http://www.businessofgovernment.org/blog/business-government/driving-citizen-centric-engagementRead my previous introductory Citizen Engagement blog post. |