4 signs your account is in need of a checkup

If you’re a communications professional in the public sector, you’re striving every day to keep citizens up-to-date with relevant—perhaps life-saving—information put out by your organisation.

But like maintaining your health, it’s important to do regular checkups to make sure your account is running as it should.

That’s because the state of your GovDelivery Communications Cloud account can have a great impact on your ability to accomplish your goals. From working to build active subscriber lists, to empowering citizens to sign up for the topics they care about most, the key components that make up your citizen comms subscription service are all most effective when they work together to support your organisation’s mission.

And sometimes, even with the best of intentions, accounts can dip into “poor health” territory.

Not sure if that applies to your organisation? Here are the top four signs that you might be due for a checkup:

1. Your subscribers stopped engaging

You can’t expect to warn, inform, inspire, educate and convert people to action if your subscribers aren’t opening your messages in the first place. When a subscriber hasn’t opened one of your messages in the last 90 days, Granicus calls them “sleepy subscribers”, or unengaged (more on engagement metrics here). Some reasons for their slumber? It might be a boring headline. Or it could be that previous content was ineffective in engaging them or lacked a proper call to action—so they don’t feel compelled to open new messages.

2. Your topics are irrelevant or outdated

Is there a list still collecting subscriptions from a campaign that wrapped up last year? Do you have a topic that you’ve amassed subscribers, but after months or years, you’ve yet to send a bulletin to them? You’ve got a case of sleepy topics. Either of the described scenarios poses a problem, because your subscribers are showing interest in content that you’re failing to deliver to them. Here’s a guide on how to tell if your topics are sleepy.

3. Your message frequency is declining

An audience remains engaged when they can consistently expect content from your department or organisation, whether that’s daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. A communications office in the public sector can get busy—even hectic—which can sometimes result in message deployment being delayed or forgotten altogether. If you notice a lull in the number of messages sent out, it could be a sign that your account health is slipping. Our brains love regularity and order. If you pledge to deliver a weekly service update on a Thursday, do try and stick to it since meeting audience expectations helps boost engagement in the longer term too.

4. Your administrators are disengaged

When administrators “check out” of managing the communications process, the performance of the account can struggle. This is trickier to catch than other problems, because only an administrator can know how often they’re accessing the account. If you’re a confident user, or the account administrator, offer regular refresher training to other administrators in your organisation, encourage others to share their ideas for improving your account, and get everyone to subscribe to Granicus’ own email updates on best practice guides, events and case studies to keep your team’s skills fresh.

Is your organisation experiencing any of these signs? In Granicus’ recent guide “Maintaining a Healthy GovDelivery Communications Cloud Account,” we provide a number of resources and tips to help you get your account back in tip-top shape.

Communicating effectively in the public sector takes time, practice and patience. Like maintaining a healthy lifestyle, incremental improvements are key. But the outcomes are significant, and can show results almost immediately when you put in the effort.