hi welcome everybody my name is vittorio wales and i am the team lead of the USA
governing and outreach team i'm here with my colleague Clare Locke 'some who
is one of our outreach team members to talk about marketing as a service and
our agency partnerships with USA gov Clare is gonna tell us a little bit
about marketing as a service as a whole and thank you so much to digital gov
University for hosting us today the feature chat or the chat feature rather
is live so feel free to ask your questions as we go along will answer
them either live or we'll have team members jump in and answer them and then
we'll also answer a few questions after after we're done with our discussion and
demoing our partnership toolkit so all right we ready to jump right in yeah
answer a few questions okay great tell us a little bit more about who is
USA gov who is our outreach team what do we do and what platforms USA gov is on
absolutely that's a great place to start so USA gov is essentially the front door
to government information and services so we think of ourselves as the four one
one or three one one on the federal government level so we work on the
premise that the public's interaction with the federal government should be an
easy experience a reliable experience and also a trusted experience so we
essentially act as the liaison between agency partners and the public so we on
the outreach team work to really push that outreach so we aggregate agency
information and disseminate it to the public so we really rely on those agency
partners as subject matter experts who really know the trends and content know
the priorities of their agencies and really are able to help us push out that
information and we are able to work with some great platforms and great tools at
USA come so we have our tried and true usa.gov website as well as our Spanish
sister website gobierno you we have social media channels email
marketing and contact center that helps us really push out that information to
the public what types of tactics does the team use to support some of these
marketing efforts you mentioned partnerships with other agencies and
some of the platforms that we're on can you talk a little bit more about what
specifically those tactics accomplish and why you use some over others yeah
absolutely we are very fortunate that we have a lot of tools and different
tactics at our disposal to work with so one of the biggest tactics we use is
just message amplification and we do that through social media through email
marketing we have a couple of different options so with social media we're able
to use a lot of different platforms like snapchat Pinterest Instagram as well as
like Twitter and Facebook as kind of our tried-and-true platforms to push
information through so with social media we both use share shared content from
agencies as well as kind of recreate some content from agencies and push that
out directly on our platforms so we do that through posts but we also host a
lot of events too so we really pride ourselves in working on direct
conversations with our public with our public audience so meeting people where
they are and getting them really engaged in those discussions on platforms like
Facebook Live and Twitter shows we're also able to do message amplification
through email marketing like I mentioned so we have a great email platform that
helps us send targeted emails to different groups of people who subscribe
to get our information we have a specific subscription page that allows
our our subscribers to be grouped into different subject areas so when they put
in their information to get emails from us they're able to put in hey I also
want to just learn about business money and shopping maybe benefit so there are
a lot of different categories that we can make sure we can kind of target the
right information to the right people so that's a great tool that we're able
to use we also have a small but mighty team of about six seven people on the
outreach side and four of them are bilingual so we're able to not only
create content in English but create content in Spanish and adapt it to a
bunch of different platforms so whether it's kind of a long-form email or an
even longer form feature on our website or it's kind of a short and sweet post
that link some information to get some action going and then one of the big
tactics we do use especially in our agency partnerships is a little bit of
kind of brainstorming best practices consulting and coaching so we have been
a brand for a really long time we have a lot of different great backgrounds on
our team so we are able to use that experience to support a bunch of
different efforts so coming up with different strategies we're finding
messages building campaigns things of that nature
oh that's I think that'll be really helpful to kind of talk a little bit
more along the lines of what types of promotions we we tend to take on so
that's a good segue it's my next question what kinds of topics or types
of promotions does USA gov work on I know we get that question a lot so if
you would talk a little bit about that I think that would be helpful yeah
absolutely so I think that as I mentioned we are that kind of four one
one really broad scope of information on the federal government so there are a
lot of different types of topics that we can focus on but we have a goal to
really meet people where they're at so there are a couple factors that go into
what topics we focus on so we definitely have our popular topics we are able to
look at our data and see people are searching for unclaimed money they're
looking at consumer protection information business support things like
that but there's also a timeliness element to it so currently it's tech
season so we get a lot of demand a lot of information requests are especially
going to IRS information scam alerts things like that are
surrounding the tax season it being the change of a physical season so winter to
spring there's a lot of information on health changes on weather changes things
like that that might come up and then I think as a whole we really like to focus
in on topics that touch a bunch of different agency information there's a
lot of agencies have very broad missions that tend to overlap so for example I
think they're exciting opportunities like student loan scams you can work
with FAFSA Department of Ed as well as FTC and other different kind of agencies
so there we really like working on those kind of new type of challenges different
overlapping opportunities and then four types of promotions I think that leads
to a little bit more of a conversation of their different levels of partnership
that we can kind of work with so as much as there are popular topics timely
topics there are some just really easy opportunities to partner so we've kind
of broken them out into levels of like one-time events one-time campaigns and
then bigger platform-specific or just completely ongoing support in campaigns
so I'll get into that a little bit more with the partnership toolkit
demonstration but that's just something to think about when looking to partner
with us a gov we have a lot of examples of agencies just reaching out to us hey
we have this new promotion can you retweet this tweet we have coming out or
hey can you include this and something you're already doing so we're already
posting we're sending some newsletters so we might as well kind of loop loop
some information in there so one example of that is we have a couple of pocs at
the Smithsonian Institute who send us links to webinars that they do every
couple weeks that are really tailored to elementary middle school high school
students so we send a weekly educator newsletter so we are able to loop that
in that was a simple email send with a link to the webinar
we can that not only helps Smithsonian getting some numbers up but that's also
something that's very easy for us to just do sand for already sending out to
that type of target and they provide a lot of that content too right which
makes it a little bit easier because I wanted to ask you to share a couple of
examples of either lesson friends but really success stories and how we
measure that impact why you would want to partner with us and I want to talk a
little bit about that more but if you could share some examples of some of the
platforms reviews to help agencies there's so many mission messaging
amplify messaging I think that would be great to share with everybody yeah
absolutely so I think there's that kind of low-hanging fruit example that I just
said what Smithsonian but we've also had some examples where we've partnered for
a longer span of time or just kind of shifted and shifted our focus around one
platform one example that I can think of is working with the Peace Corps on
snapchat takeover so we gave access to our snapchat account to Peace Corps
volunteers all over the world and they were able to really show their mission
and things that were going on visually through kind of that take over so it was
very specific to that they were obviously the ones kind of controlling
that and pushing that content out but they were able to do it through our
branch which was cool we've also done that I think with the National Park
Service we've had a couple other kind of requests coming through of that nature
so that's also a very kind of easy opportunity to shift that focus on to
that one platform a lot of people have actually come to us and asked us about
the Facebook lives and and why we do them how we do them does it make sense
for that agency to do it do one of the things that I think is interesting is
and as an added benefit as we tend to try a lot of these things brother
agencies and we share kind of lessons learned with them can you talk a little
bit about our partnership with SSA for example a Social Security Administration
yeah absolutely so we have had the benefit of partnering with SSA a few
times now on Facebook lives and that's a really great partnership that we work on
really focusing in on a topic and doing a lot of promotion and a lot of
information around around benefits in general through through SSA so on a very
recent SSA Facebook live that we did we partnered on we were able to work with
them a couple weeks ahead of time we came up with an idea to after the
holidays with it being a new year focus in on I think there were a big audience
of theirs and ours was thinking about hey I might retire in 2018 so what are
five tips that we can focus on to know before you might retire so we had that
little bit of a brainstorm focused and on that topic and then we worked with
them to develop a script we went through a couple drafts of a script found out
who both on our end on their end would be the on-screen talent for the Facebook
live and then did a lot of promotional work through email marketing through
Twitter and through Facebook to make sure that we really built up that event
and we hosted it it ended up being one of our most successful Facebook lives to
date and really got a lot of questions I think we had over 400 questions during
the live and had thousands and thousands of reach so that that was a really
exciting opportunity and it also spoke to and reinforced kind of the strategy
behind it SSA has a really big Facebook audience
we have a large Facebook audience and thinking about meeting that same kind of
concept of meeting people where they are there are the kind of median age is 50
plus it's a lot of families a lot of people supporting maybe elder relatives
so SSA was a great partner to work on that particular platform with that's
great I'm really curious for you to talk about why that platform was used over
another one a lot of times when potential partners or partners come to
us I think they want to know you know where is the best place for us to
disseminate some of that messaging and it's it's really interesting because
those tactics change is also the platform's change and the strategies
have to change because they're constantly moving in coming up
with other you know whether it's um you know artificial intelligence
opportunities or others how you can best you know jump on that that wagon and
push your content out can you talk a little bit about the office hours that
we've launched for our sort of sister psycho beer no USA and how that's kind
of been going with with that experiment yeah that's actually a great a great
opportunity that we've been working with first we've kind of done this internally
but we've been reaching out to agencies to partner on this effort so for the
gobierno office hours this is going live on Facebook on our gobierno page to our
Spanish audience completely with videos of information playing to not only give
information visually as as we are live on the platform but also it's an
opportunity where our teammates are there on the backend and representatives
from other agencies in some cases we just did it with the Frederick Federal
Trade Commission FTC for National Consumer Protection week so we were
there on the back end to kind of answer questions coming in about specific scams
broad questions very specific questions into some consumer situations that were
going on and that was completely in we did that both in English but for
gobierno we did it in Spanish which really reaches that audience that we
have found likes having that kind of direct conversation and that that
platform to be able to ask questions and really make it kind of a personal
experience so that's a really great opportunity we're always looking for
other agencies to partner with that sedan's happens to be a really broad
topic good topic to to partner on in that particular platform but I think
that's that's something we're always looking to build up there are some great
topics to focus on and gray agencies to partner with one of the conversations
that I think we have a lot is like where do we get started right because the
agencies are at different levels with some of their promotion some of them
have some things very built up or you know now they have to shift
and think about another campaign and they're like gosh we'd love to get a few
more eyes or ideas on this is there ever an opportunity where we sit down with an
agency and kind of strategize over the long term and how we can maybe share
content calendars and strategies how do we go about doing that
yeah that's a great question and I think that that's very timely so you guys
we're talking about the FTC so we have worked and partnered with the FTC
on a few different occasions National Consumer Protection week being one of
the big ones but we worked at them last year on NC P W and that was a great
success a great I think a great learning opportunity for both sides as to how to
best partner together on a lot of the promotion the best at refinement the
types of events that we focus on so having that experience last year we met
in February with FTC and had a strategic session where we came together we kind
of did our homework behind the scenes of what promotions that we wanted to focus
on what the priorities of the agency were for FTC and then for us just really
understanding what partnerships we wanted to work on thinking about it in
the broad sphere of consumer protection we were able to discuss everything from
National Consumer Protection week to focusing in on their state webinars that
they do very specifically and I think every every couple weeks they do those
as well as focusing in on their priorities like military scams charity
scams there's a lot of a lot of different focus points that they had
that we were able to come together and discuss in a two three-hour session and
came up with a mutual calendar so we essentially have six months planned out
we were able to focus in HoN and CPW but we're meeting with them soon to kind of
do a recap and see what next steps what next events what message promotion we
can do so that was a great opportunity of just kind of coming together it
didn't need to be focused on just one event it was very broad like what can we
usually do for each other to kind of push our agency mission so one of the
thing that when we are approached or asked a
lot of the times you know what's in it for you to help us but you know we also
think about you know what's what's in it for an agency right for us it's
obviously having the subject matter expert really kind of tell us you know
what are some of their priorities what kind of traffic are they getting on
their sites or questions from their own audiences and and how could we utilize
our platforms to reach those same people and more what what does this kind of
look like for an agency when they reach out to us do we you know how do we
present to them and say this is why you you could partner with us and here's
what we have to offer what's in it for them yeah that's a very good question so
I think this is kind of threefold so I'd say the team and marketing expertise I
think I've kind of covered that a bit we have great experience working on all
of these different types of tactics working with a bunch of different tools
and platforms so that's something that we have the opportunity to try different
things kind of house and host different things that an agency might want to try
that might be a little more difficult at their home agency so not only do you
have that kind of best practice focus but just kind of the platform to be able
to do that but I also think there are two other big focus group focus points
there that we have a multi-channel platform I think that having all those
different types of platforms to be working with from social media to email
marketing our ability to kind of segment and target and understand that audience
we can get the same agencies information out in a short like I said kind of a
short post on a social media site can be very visual on Instagram snapchat um
those types of platforms very educational longer kind of long-form on
features blogs and emails so we kind of have that that focus as well as that
reach so we have over 800,000 email subscribers across social media we have
over 900,000 followers and subscribers we also have
one thing that I haven't really mentioned is still a very strong print
program so we not only have all that digital outreach option all those
digital outreach options excuse me um but we have that print ability so we
have the consumer action handbook and the Spanish equivalent Vecchia and
posters that we get over 300,000 of those requests every year as well so we
have a lot of traction on those different sites and I'd say USA gov is a
really strong recognizable brand that's definitely working with not only are
there a lot of subscribers but we have a lot of that expertise a lot of history
USA gov has obviously existed for and as the contact center as the FCIC
for decades and we've been a website for 18 years and I think that's something
that is really worth utilizing from an agency's perspective and I know we
talked a lot about the front facing like when if we push out content but we have
worked also in the past to update content on our site and and add
additional resources so that conversation with other agencies is
really useful because it helps us keep our content you know up-to-date and on
the latest trends so it's really a conversation and I think we really enjoy
talking to partners about what are their priorities and how we can help them can
you talk a little bit about that impact with some of the partnerships do you
provide like I think we report you know on a lot of these campaigns and we say
here's here's the end result of partnering with us and you know how do
you explain care agencies what that impact really how that what that means
that's a great question I think that we have really started mastering all of the
data all of the metrics that we have I know I mentioned a lot of the outreach
and kind of communications marketing expertise that we have but we also have
on the broad us a gov scale we have our user experience team members analytics
web ops so we have a lot of different kind of background support there I think
we've really started mastering a lot of that information especially in our kind
of report after we really like to not only report
the numbers how it did how an event did how a campaign did how a specific post
might have done on our site so that's kind of very simple - very robust I
think depending on those levels of partnership but we also compare it to
other agencies other topics that we've worked on other events we've had how it
kind of matches up to a lot of our other content and then I think there's also a
constant learning point - so we like to share lessons learned we like to do
retros after events where we talk to the agency what went well what good and what
we potentially work on in the future and I think we do that through not only
meetings but we tried to survey a lot of partners that we work with so we get
that real-time feedback because I think like you said earlier tools are
constantly changing tactics are constantly changing the digital
landscape is really changing a lot so we like to not only adapt to that but also
as a team I think every agency and we are not not safe from this always but
just having a lot of changes internally I think a lot of things can and be very
strategic about those recommendations because as agencies budgets shrink or a
priority shift you know how you can make the best of the things that you do have
and how you can lean us to help you with that and also really interpreting that
data and say this is how you can communicate this impact to your
leadership - that's something that I have found has been really helpful - as
we've learned - to talk to our different partners they say maybe for you you
understand what this means on the social media level but here's how you might
want to communicate what this means to some of your leadership was really
interested in learning more about your engagement opportunities and what you're
working on so with that I will leave you alone with all my questions and have you
present a little bit on the toolkit so you can show us around yeah absolutely
so now that we've had the opportunity to focus in on what to expect from working
with us I think a lot of people would probably be curious too
as to how to initiate that partnership and kind of move forward so I'm going to
shift gears a little bit and focus in on the demo of the toolkit itself so this
is at USA gov excuse me USA duck of slash partnerships so you
should be seeing my screen right now so I'm gonna navigate through a little bit
of what the digital toolkit is so prefer it first and foremost we just want to
want it to be known that her digital toolkit is a great resource to learn who
we are and how to start a partnership with us
so really it's broken into four simple kind of areas so we have our landing
page which is what you're seeing right now you're seeing just this kind of
summary page where we'll align on who we are what we do what USA gov really means
what working with the outreach team really means and then then we can kind
of shift through all of that and break down into the other three pages so the
levels of partnership is what I was talking about earlier those kind of
types of promotions those levels of promotions that we work together on the
branding toolkit which focuses on talking about our partnerships how on
the agency end someone can communicate who USA gov is what our partnership
really looked like and then the get started page is really to me the most
important part of the toolkit so it really once you've built the context of
who we are on that on the back end you're able to go in and submit the
needs that you have and provide a little bit of context into what a partnership
would look like from your end so I'm just gonna go through and demo this a
little bit just to show everyone what it looks like again its usa.gov slash
partnerships if you want to explore that now or a little bit later so again we've
provided a little bit of context we have a mutual mission in the government
serving the public so this really shows who USA cup is we guide people to
information and services in both English and Spanish and we
really can't do that well unless we partner with an agency so together we
really inform and engage the public and this just echoes a lot of building
campaigns or finding messages guiding audiences to key information and these
are just some examples healthcare education housing loan opportunity is
consumer protection small business support and the and more for me I think
should be bolded and ten times bigger because we have a lot of information and
a lot of great agencies that we work with but join our powerful partnership
really just shows and reinforces these are our levels of expertise this is our
knowledge and this is what our champ this is what our channels essentially
looks like so we not only have the expertise on our back end to bring in
that knowledge and help you with whatever information you want to push
out and how but we have that brand like I said a very kind of reliable
tried-and-true brand to be working with the partnerships in action this is just
kind of a teaser like I said for that first page two levels of partnership
where we're able to show a few of the examples of agencies we've worked with
this is definitely not all of them but these are a lot of recent groups we've
worked with on some campaigns and as I mentioned before and as it says here
we've worked with these agencies on everything from a full-scale campaign to
a one-time event whether that's online in person as well as social media
campaigns social media posting something simple like that tools for partnership
as a teaser for the branding toolkit which I'll get into in a little bit just
kind of resources to show on your side how what our partnership looks like who
us a cup is and that and then a really important part of this first landing
page as you scroll down is spreading the word let's work together really just an
example of all of those different platforms you can connect through to all
of our web sites contact center everything blog YouTube
snapchat Twitter Facebook and joining our list so you can even click join our
list and get that subscription to our email messages which I have the pleasure
of managing at this point in time where you can kind of segment some of that
information you can get information on all of the topics we send out or it can
be very specific to one or two depending on what your need is so this is a great
starting point to get a lot of context into who we are
and then seeing levels of partnership this is a great opportunity to dive in
and see examples of these different levels of what working with us would
look like so we've picked out four great opportunities that we had the great
pleasure of working on and working with agencies just to kind of show the span
of the type of work that we can do so one-time events our example we have here
is the Small Business Administration we did a Spanish hosted and moderated
Google hangout with them to educate young Hispanic entrepreneurs so this got
200 viewers more than 200 questions we were able to syndicate this and get
media coverage and then ultimately for the call to action for SBA got 19
hundred page views on SDS online course so this was really we have that great
Spanish audience this was an easy platform to host it on and we're able to
get a lot of that information a lot of those call to actions from SBA and kind
of morph that together into this type of event so that's very consolidated very
focused around that one group and had specific team members and resources
focused on one-time campaigns this is a little bit bigger of bigger of an event
to focus in on so it's more of focusing in on a theme and then doing a lot of
different tactics and using different platforms to push out that type of
message this particular case was with the DOJ where we were focusing on mass
mail fraud schemes so this was very targeted to seniors
caregivers anyone who's taking care of those older relatives and we did that
through females some social media posts but this is one of those cases where you
may focus on one platform over another to really make sure that you're reaching
the right people where they are so it you might not see someone getting mass
mail fraud or become being a victim of mass mail fraud by sending an Instagram
post obviously not as much as the audience but emails Facebook now that we
understand a lot of our audience that's kind of where we can reach them best
ongoing campaign support we have our FTC example I know we touched upon we're
focusing and on we focus in on a six-month campaign and so we did
everything from creating a mutual editorial calendar to coming up with a
timeline of digital strategies this was kind of kind of an all-hands-on-deck
situation so ongoing really implies there's multiple platforms a lot of time
invested into this and part of that strategy was National Consumer
Protection week which I know I mentioned earlier and then full service support
SSA is a great example as I mentioned we've done multiple Facebook lives with
them we've had the opportunity to work across all of our platforms this is even
more all-hands-on-deck I think this has lasted as a years of a partnership and
we've had just this great mutual support of SSA providing a lot of content for us
boosting our posts as well as us boosting theirs and really working on
social security benefits which is really such a broad category of topics and so
one thing I want to mention especially as I'm going through this tool is that
every campaign is different we're constantly trying to put in a lot of
information to update these pages we're currently reviewing the toolkit to to
see where we can spice up some information maybe more guides into what
these levels look like a little bit more description descriptive so that's
definitely thing to keep in mind but these are just
four really solid examples of great partnerships that we've had so going
into the branding toolkit this is just kind of the flip side so we are partners
for a reason so this is just an opportunity for an agency to understand
how to promote us and promote the partnership that they have working with
the USA gov outreach team so this is mainly focusing on logos colors so this
seems like this is very specific directions into kind of how to market us
kind of keeping to that consistent brand that recognizable brand and keeping in
mind accessibility for kind of optimizing what this looks like - that's
one of our bigger bigger goals on our end - and then messaging examples so
like we said we have a lot of different platforms we know agencies do work with
a lot of different platforms so we have examples of elevator pitches Twitter
posts Facebook posts press releases so we know that it may be easy to market
something on Twitter from your end or you may need an elevator pitch to talk
to someone who leads your team to kind of emphasize this is why we'd like to
work with us a cover this is why or this is what we're focusing on here is kind
of a clear and concise way of saying it because we really do want to keep
enhancing our brand as well as enhancing a lot of the information that all the
agencies are able to send to us and then finally once you've gotten a lot of this
context of working with us this is one of my favorite features is the get
started form so you kind of have all that context of who we are and now we
want to know who you are so this is just a simple kind of form to fill out where
we have a way of contacting you and have a way of making that kind of first step
into what a partnership would look like between us so very simple you can
provide as much information as you know so if you know it's just going to be
email marketing it's on this specific very specific topic
you only need support in Spanish you can check off these boxes as you go if you
don't know what your partnership would exactly look like it may be good to
check everything or check other and just say hi I'm looking forward to exploring
what an opportunity of collaborating would be or I'm looking forward to
learning what bilingual capabilities really mean do you create the content do
I this is a great opportunity to ask questions so once that request comes in
and I'll I'll kind of send an example get in touch that sends a message to us
with all that context so that when we're able to reach out set up a meeting we
both know what to expect going into it there's not that that time spent oh who
are you what do you do oh I didn't understand this so it really kind of
streamlines that process and then it brings you to this page so this allows
you to explore the toolkit even more this allows you to maybe go back to
branding if you miss something partnerships if you wanted to relook at
an example or link through even on the levels of partnership page you're able
to link through to to the examples there so you can go to that recording of the
Hangout you can see the Facebook live I think we may start linking to those
reports and guides like I said and you can also go to usa.gov you can go to the
usa.gov explore page which is also another great summary of working with
our team as a whole and so this is just a great consolidated way to build that
context and start that conversation so that's the demo
I know as Victoria said there is the questions option in the chat box so if
you have any questions feel free to send those alone this is really great I'm
glad we got an opportunity to look through what people can expect by
looking at the toolkit sometimes I think some of our newer or older maybe even
partnerships also have come out of us seeing our data because a lot of the
questions we get it's like oh you gave us a call like why is that
well we are getting a lot of calls for a contact center on this specific topic
and we want to be able to answer people with the latest information so we look a
lot at our data because we get a lot of questions on social media where a
contact center we get comments on our site on all types of topic and we try to
do is really streamline and you know create as much content that's easy to
use in plain language so we will go and approach a partner and say hey do you
have somebody we can talk to about this because we'd really like to be able to
address this question and that's usually how some of these partnerships are born
so would you say that is it now more like that is it a like a 50/50 or more
people are coming to us I'd say there are so many channels for communication
now but there's still are those word-of-mouth opportunities and before
the partnership toolkit existed that was like you said the main way of
communicating and I still think especially since there are there's a
great network within the government of communicators there are a lot of great
listservs that we are able to send information through I think we still get
a lot of those kind of word of mouth or if we have kind of a specific topic
we're focusing in on we can reach out to partners that may not be in that same
realm and that agency but can connect us to the right person but I'd say since
we've started promoting the toolkit and and starting to make this a little more
known we're getting a lot of submissions through the toolkit and that makes it so
easy for us to know what to expect it makes it so easy for an agency to really
learn what to expect from us as well so I'd say we are getting that influx in
much more increasingly at this point so a lot of the times I think we hear this
question quite a bit is how much does you think of charge for these services
that's a great question so we do get that quite a bit so I think it's very
clear to say partnerships with USA gov with our outreach team don't cost an
agency any fee there's no contract required no interagency agreement or
kind of similar contract - that needs to occur but we do
say that just because someone sends a request doesn't mean we're automatically
going to work on that partnership but like we said I think we're building up a
lot of those partners learning a lot about agencies connecting with a lot of
agency contacts so don't let that statement defer you in any way we really
evaluate it based on bandwidth time of year if the market is saturated
essentially so if like a lot of people are talking about that topic and we may
just get lost in the noise but I think we just really like connecting with
other agencies what like you said like I said we're always amplifying the content
on our pages so we really do take the time to thoughtfully and strategically
evaluate whether a partnership is good for both parties Yeah right for both of
us and at that time so but I think that also speaks to the levels of partnership
so just because we can't do an event with you on one particular day or one
particular week that doesn't mean it's not a good opportunity to send over a
post and have us be like oh well this is a great topic for our audience once we
tweet it let's turn it into an email let's do something like that so there is
that kind of low-hanging fruit we want to that's really that's really great
one of the questions that we've received is how are you doing live video events
do you film them from your own studio or do you go to the agency I really love
this question as well so we do a little bit of a hybrid so so we're doing a live
video events mostly at GSA so we've done I'd say about a dozen so far and that
doesn't include gobierno office hours I believe so maybe a little bit more than
that but we do tend to film them here at GSA we have a lot of great equipment a
lot of great partners but the agency that helped us do these types of events
like digitalgov university we have the opportunity every once in a while to go
to an agency to also do the events there so in green
Rison ssa facebook life we were able to go to ssa his studio in Baltimore which
was very robust setup it was a very cool change of pace and really showed the I
think that it was really a partnership so we weren't the only ones doing that
back-end support they had a great team who was working on that video production
that script production making sure that every like every eye was dotted and T
was crossed along the way so we really do do a mix of everything if you just
joined us or you joined just a little bit later we're talking about the USA
gov outreach team what we do what marketing is the service means in the
government the types of projects and partnerships that we've taken on can you
talk a little bit about what the partnership looks like let's say an
agency comes and engages us and they what is the expectation that we also
have as a team to get help from them since you know we don't charge and and
and we need kind of all-hands-on-deck sometimes can you talk a little bit
about how we communicate that for that kind of support and extra amplification
yeah absolutely so we have I think a pretty great process of focusing in on
setting expectations ahead of time so I think with our toolkit we're able to
present that information about us make sure that agencies put as much
information in as they can but we in that first interaction once we get the
submission form and then respond and set up a meeting we really try to
communicate can you come up with your objectives whatever your what are your
goals what is your timeline look like so we really ask those questions as soon as
possible to a line we also on our end come with a lot of understanding of who
on our team is available what those needs are if they explicitly say and
this is one great thing about the forum too we definitely have leads on social
media leads on Facebook lines leads on email marketing so if it's an effort
that focuses on that team member we try to get people in as soon
possible in that conversation so I think that allows for a lot of context to be
built and not wasting a lot of time so making that very clear those like
setting those expectations very clearly and coming in with a calendar - we
always try to from our end have the editorial calendar up to date having our
information up to date making sure we know who is doing what who's committed
to doing what with what agency so I think we really try to kind of organize
that to set that process going ahead of time awesome
can you just reiterate or repeat some of the channels that we're on in case folks
joined this a little bit later and we talked quite a bit through them but yeah
absolutely and just a reminder to everyone they can ask everyone can ask
questions on on YouTube directly in the chat if you have any questions and
missed that part ahead of time um so we have a bunch of different channels and
that's one of the great benefits of our brand so we have the usa.gov website
gobiernousa.gov is our spanish sister site there are social media platforms
like Twitter Facebook Instagram snapchat Pinterest we have YouTube so we're
really kind of running that whole span of platforms on social media we have our
email marketing tool and we have our contact center which is a great a great
channel where people can call in or you can send email inquiries chat enquiries
so that also really runs the span of if there's any question if you need clarity
on something we essentially act as that kind of warm touch point to pass it off
to an agency from the call center side and then we also have our print our
print program which has our Ghia and handbook that has a lot of consumer
protection information and a lot of that great printable such as a consumer
action handbook which includes a lot of information from various agencies on all
sorts of topics that that help people make better decisions when purchasing a
home or or just you know everyday life and and trends really for
consumer protection so that's a really great resource that we also ask a lot of
agencies you know to promote some of our content and say don't forget that you
know as we're a partner maybe some folks have questions on something else and we
can direct them to the to the site so so how would if somebody wanted to so you
would you mentioned the first step would be to kind of look at the toolkit maybe
review some of the examples and then send us maybe an inquiry as a first next
step that would be a good way to do it can you talk a little bit about let's
say we take on a partner what's kind of the life cycle of that campaign let's
say we get all this great content we do this live event like what happens with
all of those questions that we answer let's say on a Facebook live does that
inform our site it certainly informs what the partner is doing and really
shifting like okay we really thought even though we we had some information
on this topic and we need to expand on this because there's a lot of confusion
around this particular benefit let's say what is kind of the we ever recycle that
content do we share with other agencies how do we go about doing that absolutely
so I think that a lot of those questions essentially that come in in those events
or through those promotions we really try to collect those also like you said
not only does that inform the report feature that I did talk about how we try
to especially within a two-week span if there's an event like for example a
facebook live we try to collect all that information and send it along to the
agency because that's really valuable information for them to use but it also
can inform strategically some of our next steps our next events for example
we got a lot of questions about disability benefits during the
retirements benefits Facebook live so we then realized we should send some
Facebook posts about this we should send an email about this this is clearly
content that there's clearly a demand for that information so I think that's
something to think about moving forward strategically both with the agency so
sharing with them so they know they can do whatever they want with that data but
also and former channels we have so many
different sources of data and we try to kind of collect that and move that
forward if an agency maybe is exploring to get on a new platform because they
think you know we certainly are like that as a team we're like oh look at
this new platform all we should be maybe on some show we should try this reddit
you know how do we go about it like sort of counseling and you can see whether or
not they should or should not be on that platform I think we make general
recommendations and what our experience is but can you talk a little bit about
kind of why it's also helpful to partner with us because we might be able to like
try it out ourselves or maybe we're already experimenting on that platform
yeah I think that the value of asking us about a new platform or working with us
to work through that kind of best practice consulting piece is that we
have that experience going through and trying out different platforms but I
think we've also thought a lot about both like the information that we have
but also thinking about who's on what platform so I think we have a good idea
of what our goals are and what the point of being on some of those platforms is
as much as like a new platform may be the next big thing it might not be the
most strategic channel for an agency to be on but rather than creating an
account going through that whole new process I think especially with the
Peace Corps example they were able to use our platform kind of take it over
try it out and see if that worked for them while using our brand so that's
something that that they can think about moving forward there are a few things
you want to share sort of to the audience and the folks viewing the chat
today that you might want to share not only about our work but also kind of
talk about any marketing trends a new video something that people keep asking
us about not just the events but also you know is that a good way to keep
engaging people and kind of what we learned about that and how we kind of
keep up with a sort of latest market new trends we're still the government so we
can experiment with some things but there are other things we we we don't
generally do we can't do right so yeah I'd say video is a great example
so a lot of people are picking that information in that type of form much
more visual in terms of that educational piece I'd say there are so many there's
a lot of value in videos in infographics in kind of short and sweet posting
especially from from the social media perspective so I'd say with with Twitter
though I think that's this is an interesting thing that's come up with
the extension of the character count and Twitter I think people are still
collecting their information in a short and sweet way so as much as there's a
lot of things to try that's something to still think about people are digesting
very short pieces of information there with email I'd say we're trying out
again more visual adding gifs and two gifs or gifts or how we go on for them
that and to our email than making that a little more interactive a little more
fun as well as emojis I think those are really hot right now to pop for a
government government and I think well there are always there are always things
to explore I know we're gonna we're starting to do more Instagram stories we
learn also from a lot of other agencies and what we can try right it's a great
conversation any time you can talk to another agency I also wanted to take an
opportunity to share our blog its blog dot usa.gov we also publish quite a bit
about our work not just in marketing but in UX and accessibility also analytics
so Google Analytics and what the work that our team does on that end um do you
want to remind everybody the URL you'd like folks to visit too and how to get
started with us absolutely so usa.gov slash partnerships you'll be able to
find the partnership toolkit all that information is there and most
importantly that gets started form is there for kind of initiating that
partnership also feel free to follow all of us on all of our social media
and email sites that's all linked through the digital toolkit as well so
feel free to delimit us a back of slash partnerships you can expect you know a
pretty quick reply after you reach out to us so and we're happy to elaborate
anytime on all other agency partnerships and and projects and work we've done
with with other folks I think that's we've kind of run out of
time this has been a great conversation so thank you for joining me in and
showing us around and until next time thank you everyone thank you thank you
for joining us
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