# Presentation: 347413

## Educating Our Bosses

- Janet B. Stevens, PMPFood Safety and Inspection Service/USDAJanet.Stevens@fsis.usda.gov

## Challenges

- Agencies and offices have established web sites with different designs that grew “organically”
- Many don’t have reliable methods to collect or analyze data, understand their audiences or site performance, so sites often suffer from personality-driven changes
- Most don’t have governance models or separate budgets
- Web managers are split across OCIO/PA staffs
- Management often doesn’t understand what it takes to manage a site successfully or how sites support the mission

## Solutions

- Establish a common look and feel, but avoid “design by committee”.
- Promote how other agencies have made mission-driven sites by understanding *their* users, applying best practices, and using data collection and analysis tools.
*Plan* to get resources. Be creative & patient!
- Develop governance models and strategic plans
- Link your performance measures to your agency’s goals and market how the site supports the mission
- Ask for what you need, until you get it.
- Market how the site is a mission-critical *communications* function; IT supports it.
- Consider management a target audience group and learn how they like to receive information and make decisions.

## Plan Out What You Need

- Budget?
- Personnel?
- Training?
- Contracted help?
- Software?
- Hardware?
- Respect for the site?
- Decisions?

## Learn About Your Bosses

- As a target audience
- How much time do they have to spend discussing web issues?
- How do they use technology?
- How do they like to communicate?
- What do they understand and what do they need to know?
- What motivates them to make decisions?
- How do their decisions affect the agency/mission?

## Learn About Your Agency’s Planning Processes

- Read the strategic & tactical plans
- Learn the budget & planning cycle
- When are decisions made?
- Who makes the decisions?
- How are they approved?
- Get to know the budget and planning staff and learn from them
- Start contributing planning information to your boss, in the correct format & at the right time

## Develop a Web Strategic Plan

- As a team:
- Set goals and milestones
- Develop performance measures
- Tie them to the agency and office’s mission
- Develop a communications plan
- Manage the goals as projects

## Market, Market, Market!

- Use all of your information and audience analysis to implement your communications plan
- Promote your successes
- Show how the site support the mission at a critical time
- When you don’t meet your goals, show how implementing your plan would have prevented the failure
- Enlist other managers to align them with your goals

## Tips & Tricks: Time

- Is your boss really busy?
- Learn when he’s most likely to have time to respond to you (early or late in the day? Certain days?)
- Present information graphically

## Tips & Tricks: Motivation

- Is your boss motivated by:
- Data? Show him statistics and trends
- Politics? Show how your goals help the agency meet OMB or PMA reqs
- Looking tech savvy? Promote analytics tools or content management/portal products that help meet mission goals
- Competition? Align your goals with your agency being first, best, clever, etc.

## Tips & Tricks: Communication

- Find out if your boss prefers:
- Face-to-face interactions
- Phone calls
- Emails
- Presentations
- One-on-one or group discussions
- Remember: You have to adapt to their requirements, not the other way around

## Tips & Tricks: Personality, Pt 1

- Do they have strong opinions about design?
- Test the designs any way you can
- Present the results as to how users more successfully accomplished what they wanted to do on the site
- Show how this helps support the mission (results vs. ideas)

## Tips & Tricks: Personality, Pt 2

- Are they “too knowledgeable” about your site visitors?
- Collect data on your target audiences, either from existing resources (see WebContent.gov) or through targeted audience analysis
- Meet with other agencies/private industry and document best practices that show the *results *they wanted to achieve
- The key is, it’s not *your* opinions vs. *theirs*. It’s just impersonal data.

## Case Study: Email Subscription Service

**Problem **
- Management wanted a What’s New page
- Not enough resources to maintain it
- Unless topic-based, often frustrating for users
**Process**
- State the real problem: Visitors wanted to know when new content was posted on the site only for the content they were interested in
**Solution**
- Gather requirements for an email subscription service
- Selected a product that allowed subscribers to manage their own subscriptions, allowed web managers to have automated messages sent based on page changes or manual/scheduled pushes, provided analytics, and worked with our CMS.

## Case Study: Email Subscription Service

**Management Angle**
- Targeted and contemporary solution for constituents
- Learning that subscribers only want to visit when items they’re interested in have been updated
- Monitoring subscription items and subscriber habits to learn what triggers the highest click-through rates
**Promoting Our Success with Management**
- Stats reported daily, trends analyzed
- Goal 10,000 new subscribers in our 1st year
- Reality: Over 15,000 new subscribers in our 1st year
- Top categories: News Releases & Recalls
- Recent digesting option selected by over 1,000 subscribers
- Customers liked that the service alerted them to new content, but didn’t fill their box up with attachments
- Subscriber snapshot:
- 1,619 USDA employees, 340 non-USDA Federal subscribers
- 502 universities
- Foreign subscribers: 214 Canada, 40 UK, 33 Japan, 28 Mexico
- Top business: Perdue, 21 subscribers
- News wire subscribers increasing
- Cell phone/wireless subscribers increasing (tracks with site statistics)

## Case Study: Web Analytics Tool

**Problem: **We needed to upgrade our web analytics package.
**Process: **Tie to another agency problem: Inability to determine to what extent agency education campaigns or targeted information was being accessed online after an event
**Solution:** Used web analytics tool create a graphic to show how within an hour of an announcement by the Administrator, site traffic jumped significantly when compared to the same day and time of the previous week. Sent to my boss and the Administrator.
**Management Angle:** Ended up being emailed to the Secretary’s office and discussed in a departmental meeting
**Result:** Got $ to upgrade

## Case Study: Customer Satisfaction Survey

**Problem: **We wanted to continue our customer satisfaction survey for another year but had to fight for budget
**Process: **Show how segmented survey results could be used by other groups. Allowed other groups to suggest to the staff additional custom questions.
**Solution:** At management meeting, gave a presentation on our customer segments targeted to our education and outreach offices.
**Management Angle:** They learned more about our audience groups and also cleared up some misconceptions about why they were going to the site and their satisfaction with the site
**Result:** Got $ to continue and added a few custom questions for their needs.

## Presentation Resources

- USDA Audience Analysis:http://www.webcontent.gov/documents/USDA_Audience_Analysis.pdf
- FSIS Style Guide: _[http://](http://www.webcontent.gov/documents/FSIS_Styleguide.pdf)__[www.webcontent.gov/documents/FSIS_Styleguide.pdf](http://www.webcontent.gov/documents/FSIS_Styleguide.pdf)_
- This presentation will be posted to WebContent.gov
- Contact meJanet.Stevens@fsis.usda.gov