Seattle downtown and Space Needle view, Washington, USA

Leaders from Washington gathered at the Columbia Tower Club on Tuesday, February 13, for the first Digital Engagement Day in 2018 of the Granicus World Tour to learn about Granicus communication solutions that are changing how engagement with constituents is performed.

Warren Kagarise, Digital Engagement Manager at King County, Washington, shared his experience with building digital channels for citizens of the county. Remaining proactive and transparent are among the most-important qualities of his communication strategy.

“We want to improve public perception but also be mindful of the resources we use,” Kagarise said.

Kagarise also shared five steps to his engagement strategy that has built a candid, thoughtful and engaging experience for constituents:

• Identify the issue – It’s important to determine early on whether the issue needs to be explained or may require a call to action. Identifying the issue determines how to implement the remaining four steps of this process.
• Determine the audience – Determining the audience demographic makes it easier to decide the most-effective method to communicate. Younger audiences may be more influenced by social platforms like Instagram while older constituents may prefer more traditional methods of communication.
• Pick your platform – If you’re trying to reach everyone, it’s pretty obvious that you might choose to communicate through every channel, but if you have a specific audience in mind, there are strategic methods to consider for different age groups and demographics.
• Tailor content – Create content that appeals to the community and audience you need to reach. Content is most effective when it syncs with the platform, such as taking advantage of live video streams on Facebook to build an audience as updates occur in real time. This step is the most time consuming of the engagement process since content needs to be personalized to the audience.
• Adjust communication as needed – It may feel like communication creation never ends, and maybe it’s because it doesn’t. If content fails to resonate with citizens, it can’t just be written off as a failure; instead, it’s a first attempt. When a longer video doesn’t pick up the expected traffic, editing the content down into shorter segments can make it easier to decipher why the longer piece didn’t work. And repurposing information is key to maintaining engagement, so you should expect to always be tweaking content you’ve already created.

Granicus solutions are tailored to agencies at every level – state, local, federal and special districts. Digital Engagement Day stops on our World Tour serve as a learning opportunity for the driven leaders in government overseeing policy creation, communication efforts and the daily processes of a government office.

Want to learn more about how you can use Granicus solutions to improve digital engagement with citizens? Contact us at info@granicus.com.

This post was originally published on Granicus.com