10 Quick Tips to Engage Your Community Through Your Website

  

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Turning your city, county, town, parish, township or village website into a hassle-free, easy-to-use, interesting extension of your governmental efforts doesn't have to be a painful process.

There are ways you can improve your website right now that will have an immediate effect on how your citizens utilize your website, and the quality of experience they have while perusing your site.

Here are 10 quick ways you can instantly improve your local government website.

1. Stop shoving everything on your homepage. Check your site analytics. What are the top 5-7 things your citizens are searching for and actually reading on your website? Put those things - and only those things - on your homepage, and leave the rest to the site navigation, which should be intuitive and easy to use. Evaluate your stats on a quarterly basis. 

2. Stop using organizational jargon. Stop calling trash, "solid waste." What I think of as solid waste is a whole lot uglier than just trash. Don't call it "Judiciary Services." Call it "Courts." Use jargon in emails to coworkers, not on your website.

3. Be transparent. Provide downloadable budgets, financial reports and check registers online; archive all information that is displayed on your website; have a searchable staff directory that includes contact information; post information about Governing Board or Council meetings, and include time, location, agendas, minutes and archived meeting information; provide a way to electronically submit public information requests.

4. Update frequently. Utilize a content management system that allows staff across your organization to update their section of the website at any time, with the ease of working on a Microsoft Word-like piece of software. Frequent posting of news, calendar events, agendas, photos, updates and progress reports will keep website users coming back for more.

5. Go mobile. There's no getting around this. So many people utilize their mobile devices to access the Internet and to email that making actual phone calls is becoming an afterthought. If you're not offering a way for citizens to access your information in a mobile-friendly way, you're probably losing a large segment of the population.

6. Be interactive. Implement features that get your citizens using the website for stuff other than official government business. Blogs, citizen feedback forums, photo contests, and any other way to get users coming back to your website.

7. Reach out from your website. Utilize email and text message subscriptions to push important information out to your citizens to meet them where they're at, rather than forcing them to always check your website to see if there is new news.

8. Get social. Your citizen users are on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and other social media platforms WAY more than they are on your local government website. Reach out to citizens in the online avenues that they most frequent in order to draw them back to the relevant information on your website.

9. Offer contact information. Ideally, your website would answer all of your citizens' questions, and allow them to address all of their issues and concerns through your website functionality. But if they can't - or simply don't want to - make sure contact information is readily available to assist them further. There's nothing more frustrating for a user than to search aimlessly on a government website for contact information that is hidden or not obvious. It ends up wasting more of their time and yours when contact information isn't prominent on your website.

10. Think like a citizen. Stop expecting that your citizens understand - or even want to understand - your organizational structure. Base your site navigation and information on the services your organization provides, not by departmental names and titles.

While these 10 tips might seem fairly straightforward, it's important to note that implementing these things without first putting a plan in place can lead to disaster. Giving your citizens features and functionality that they'll use and then taking it away because a plan wasn't firmly in place can lead to your organization being slapped with the dreaded tag of "censors."

Always create a Citizen Interaction Plan to detail how you will handle your digital engagement with the public before you provide citizens with these functions, and then expose that plan to the public to set guidelines and boundaries.