One of Ontario’s largest regional municipalities hired PMG Intelligence to assist their internal communications staff with recommendations for the development of both their internal and external communications practices.
More specifically, they wanted our insights and recommendations in terms of the following;
- Current awareness of program and service offerings
- Effectiveness of various media (radio, television, internet, newsprint)
- Frequency of informational dissemination
- Means of, and access to, communication with residents
- Evaluation of community engagement
- Current brand awareness
In short, they wanted insights that would help them communicate better with residents, taxpayers and businesses.
The tools to gather this information included one-on-one executive interviews with staff, traditional quantitative research with 2,500 participants, multiple focus groups covering all the relevant stakeholder groups and engagement with our in-house marketing communications experts.
The research confirmed that citizens were looking for more information and updates, opportunities for more input, more “direct” communication with residents and more transparency. And clearly, satisfaction would be improved through better communications, better tactics and more interaction with citizens. So our recommendations focused in the following areas:
- Consistency in presentation in terms of brand, logo and key messaging - While difficult to enforce in a large municipality, adherence to a Style Guide ensures that all communications are professional, easily recognized and do not run the risk of a new communication tool becoming a brand onto itself.
- Community Engagement - While these are traditionally poorly attended, they continue to provide value in terms of openness, accessibility and taking away a common gripe of citizens that they don’t have a voice.
- Digital Media - Unfortunately, governments for the most part utilize Web 1.0 strategies of delivering content while citizens live in Web 2.0 world. Web 1.0 is information heavy, passive and more telling than engaging while Web 2.0 is the transformation of the Web from a passive to an active communication tool.
The implementation of our recommendations is an ongoing exercise.