- 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
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
-
- Richer content, value added
-
- Permanent Secretarys challenge to BIS Comms
-
- BISs role in the growth agenda
9. A false start
-
- 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
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