The last decade has seen a transformation in community engagement by Government departments. Traditional “town hall” style meetings and telephone research have been increasingly replaced by the arrival of a variety of engagement portals and online surveys. With varying levels of success, departments are using digital tools to canvass opinions on everything from proposed procurement
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In the last few weeks, I’ve been invited to share experiences with a few groups of successful people considering that first leap into consultancy. The temptations of being your own boss are obvious. Greater control of your time and focus, a chance to excel in your chosen field and increased job satisfaction. Shame then that
- Published in Government, Latest posts, Lifestyle, Tech
It’s odd writing a history for something still less than ten years old, but there’s a common theme emerging in discussions with our clients in 2021. For many, we were there at the beginning of their social media adventure, helping design social media policies and supporting them in discussions with risk averse senior managers, still
- Published in Digital, Government, Latest posts
My timeline continues to be dominated by the fallout from the news that Paul Shetler, having made the decision to leave the DTO, had written a farewell blogpost describing his sixteen months in Australian Government. The DTO has since been renamed as the DTA and relocated to Canberra but imagining what lies ahead is as
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I’m sure most of us took time over the holidays, not only to rest but also to catch up on our reading. (Happy New Year, by the way). Seems to me that away from the madness of world politics, the most prevalent theme in my reading seemed to be discussions about Artificial Intelligence. Even in
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It never fails. Every post, every keynote, every workshop where I talk about the value of digital advertising always begs the same question. What would the digital guru say? When I talk about the low response rates to targeted advertising, what’s the other side of the story? Putting aside the fact that Facebook got their
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A recent article in the Harvard Business Review was claiming that the rise of “digital” in business has become so dominant, so overwhelming, that it is no longer just part of the economy, but, and I quote… “Digital is the economy”. Far be it from me to take on the highbrow experts at Harvard, but
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As regular readers will know, I spend a fair bit of time working with Government departments across Australia helping them to really get to know their customers. Customer research is for some parts of Government still a very new area. As indeed is the notion of customers. I’ve seen the users of Government services described
- Published in Digital, Government
Some days working in communications in Government can be tough. Yesterday was definitely one of those days. After a tetchy few weeks in the run up to the census, the first I was aware of the communications drama unfolding at the ABS was a series of tweets yesterday morning describing graphically how a number of
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In the two years since I launched GovCom, we’ve observed hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the pursuit of innovation, seen thousands involved in Government hackathons, hundreds of thousands more involved in community engagement programmes and a stream of new Government service initiatives announced from digital licences in NSW to the formation of Service
- Published in Digital, Government