1. Making the most of GovDelivery John Turnbull, Web Manager

2. Me and the team

Manage the day-to-day operations of the core BIS website ( www.bis.gov.uk )

Small central digital team 3.5 of us working on the site

An ever-changing number of devolved web publishers

3. The website

Core BIS site plus nine partner organisation sites (inc. Insolvency Service, UK Space Agency and National Measurement Office)

Shared platform hosted and maintained by Eduserv

Approx. 330K uniques & 1.5m pageviews per month

Also blogs.bis.gov.uk

4. The department

BIS is the Department for Growth

Supporting sustained growth and higher skills across the economy

Broad range of policy areas:

5. Telling people what were doing

In the current economic climate, growth is the governments no.1 priority

So its more important then ever for the Department for Growth to communicate what its doing

Email alerts are a critical part of our overall strategy

6. Our history with GovDelivery

Implemented in 2008 when we refreshed the old berr.gov.uk website

Initial set-up: everything but the kitchen sink pagewatch on almost all pages

Realised we might overwhelm potential subscribers

Plus many pages not updated often

Cut back to manageable number

7. Could do better

We gathered a respectable number of subscribers over the first two years

But we didnt make the most of the system; we were coasting

Various reasons: mainly reduced resources coupled with growing workload

8. Grasping the nettle

Decision made: improve our offering to subscribers

Desired outcomes:

• Richer content, value added

• More subscribers

Drivers:

• Permanent Secretarys challenge to BIS Comms

• BISs role in the growth agenda

9. A false start

Wanted to:

• Make alerts relevant, clearly indicating what has been updated

• Devolve responsibility to web publishers

Investigated setting up integrated alerts in Sitecore CMS

But underestimated the server power needed to handle the millions of emails each year

Approach too expensive

10. Back to basics

New approach: review our offering and reconfigure

RSS-driven alerts working well for the right content types: news features, press releases, consultations, speeches and blog posts

But RSS not suitable for our (many hundreds) of static HTML policy pages

11. Pagewatch or not?

Old system of checking admin alerts driven by pagewatch no longer good for us

Additional workload for central team, changes in devolved publishers meant that the emails were not always checked

Not always sure what was really new

(Although planning to implement pagewatch tags on all content templates in future)

12. Step 1: creating new categories 13. Step 2: getting granular 14. Step 3: making the service more visible A big, bold call to action on almost every page on the site 15. Step 4: switching off pagewatch Not enabled for static HTML pages Still enabled where new content is published as discrete items 16. Step 5: devising a process

An RSS feed:http://www.bis.gov.uk/feeds/policies

17. Step 6: adding value

Going beyond the default text to provide a more compelling reason to click through:

18. Step 7: tell the world!

Bulletin to all subscribers to inform them of the wider, more granular range of topics available

19. How will we know if its working? Overall no. of subscribers picking up after being flat for a while:

New topics have attracted 10,000+ subscriptions already

20. Well keep a close eye on overall numbers 21. And well watch our click-through rate 22. And another thing

We also offer alerts for one of our partner sites, the National Measurement Office

And we are about to launch same for UKSA

Separate templates for NMO bulletins