Effective Communications Can Help Government Employees “Buy In” to Your Agency Goals
For many years the government did not see the value of marketing their initiatives to employees. Often seen as a waste of money and resources, agencies did not appreciate the positive Return-on-Investment (ROI) for marketing. Today, many Federal Government agencies recognize that effective communication can make the difference between failure and success. Many learning programs have spent millions of dollars implementing new systems, but often stall because the new capabilities were not communicated effectively. By following some industry best practices, you can avoid some common marketing and communication mistakes and help your employees “buy into” in your new program.
Identify and understand your audience
It is critical to understand the culture and behaviors of your target audience. Therefore, your business objectives and goals should align to your audiences’ needs. Answers to the following questions will help jump-start your marketing program.
1. What do your employees know?
2. What do you want them to know?
3. What do you want them to do?
Connect with your audience
Connecting with your audience is more than just understanding their needs. You have to understand what challenges they face, and the role they feel they play within your organization. Their perceptions often conflict with their actions, and the true distinctions can be subtle. To create positive behavioral change, however, the communications must appeal to both their perceptions and their actions.
Maintain your brand
A brand is more than a logo. It is the emotional experience an individual has with your collateral, your Website, your customer service help desk, and your employees. Your research should begin by determining the health of your brand, or the perceptions of what people think and feel about all of your touch points. If there are challenges with entering into a Learning Management System (LMS), those challenges are reflected in your overall brand. This could mean that your brand may have suffered due to password challenges and system timeouts! For this reason, it is important to develop a plan to manage each touch point to improve the overall brand perceptions of your audience.
Make your technology transparent
Everyone experiences technology every day. When it fails to work, it slows everything down (a good example of this is a cell phone dead zone). This makes technology itself apparent, intruding on conversations and frustrating users. While failure points cannot be removed completely, many of the related “friction points” can be managed. One of your goals should be to remove as many friction points as you can to improve the performance of your employees. A number of interface usability studies over the years highlight these trouble spots for the audience. Some can be as simple as including labels on navigational features, or writing in your audiences’ normal tone of voice.
Track your results/measure your success
A number of marketing programs are built on platforms to push out information. This is seen as a one-way conversation. It is difficult to know how successful you are if you cannot see how receptive your audience is to the information. This is why you need to monitor the results of each individual marketing initiative. By setting a baseline prior to a marketing campaign rollout, you are able to measure the success of the message, the media, and the delivery method.
Keep it alive
Imagine seeing a commercial for a product just once. There is a good chance you would not remember it if you never saw it again. The principle around keeping a marketing program alive is to continue to feed and nurture it. Audiences need to see things multiple times and in different ways before they begin to believe the offer is credible, or that there is a benefit to them. History has shown that one message with one tool will deliver one result – little response. Organizations have had great success with multiple messages delivered over time, in multiple formats, to promote new ideas that can inspire an audience to take action. Your marketing and communication approach must have a similar consistency and longevity for your audience to “buy in.”