Making Customer Satisfaction Data Actionable at the Peace Corps
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22 posts
Webinar Recap: Snaps and Stripes—Sharing Public Service Stories with Snapchat
What does Snapchat, the disappearing message-and-video platform most used by teenagers, have to do with government outreach and communications programs? Well, Snapchat has quickly become an incredibly effective digital storytelling medium, and content creators across multiple government agencies have adopted it as an important part of their programs. A recent New York Times article described
Touring Top Colleges with the Peace Corps
I wanted to share our first dabble with data storytelling, a visualization supporting the Peace Corps Top Colleges initiative led by our awesome press team. Our goal was to enhance and expand the experience of the Top Colleges campaign and use of the data beyond the usual suspects like infographics, and other assets to show
How to Manage Multimedia Assets: What Peace Corps Is Doing to Grow Its Photo and Video Archives
When Alex Snyder started working at Peace Corps a few years ago, he had an opportunity to explore a new platform for housing their digital assets. As a professional photographer himself, he saw the value in focusing on visual elements and making those more accessible. He focused on making the library about photos, video and
#SomosSocial: 5 Keys for Government to Reach Hispanics Through Social Media
Hispanics are one of fastest growing demographics in the U.S. But like any demographic, there are important nuances to consider when connecting with this audience. Insight into your audience’s motivations, behavior and preferences is key for anyone trying to engage with the public. We know every day that more and more Hispanics are on social
Optimizing Social at Peace Corps: Not a Zero-Sum Game
At the Peace Corps, we continually try to find new ways to test, measure and optimize our marketing and communications initiatives. Recently, we embarked on a project to design a framework to test and optimize content on the social media platforms we use to engage our stakeholders. This process required us to reboot our expectations in terms of
Taking a Data-Driven Approach to Digital Marketing at the Peace Corps
What exactly does being “data-driven” mean for digital marketing and communications practitioners in the federal government? It is easy to be awed by the new shiny platforms and services that promise to change how things are done in government. Fundamentally, though, it is thinking about analytics not just from a descriptive mindset but one of
Are FAQs Still Relevant?
Users have questions. Your content and website navigation can help them find answers, or potentially cause frustration. One tool for answering questions is up for debate: are FAQ sections still relevant in 2015, or are they a relic of bygone days? Nielsen Norman Group recently published two articles arguing for the continued use and usefulness
Sharing the Essentials of Animated Gifs for Public Services
Animated gifs are increasingly found throughout the digital experience of today’s users.
Big in SocialGov in 2014: Services, Access and Participation
Social media for public service is a diverse field that uses platforms and data from both the private and public sectors to improve citizen services, make them easier to access and deliver them more cost effectively. It is not just public affairs or communications, but spreads into customer service, resource development and more. Many of
With Every Tool Possible: Supporting Humanitarian Aid Efforts Through Crowdsourced Mapping
Fighting malaria in Botswana with a group of high school students in D.C. Contributing to the Ebola response from the West Bank. These scenarios may not fit the typical image of humanitarian aid efforts, but technology has transformed the possibilities for public participation in international development. Crowdsourced mapping projects have
2nd U.S. Public Participation Playbook Draft Responds to Public Contributions
The new second draft of the U.S. Public Participation Playbook incorporates changes that were proposed from nearly 100 suggestions submitted after the first week of public comment, with more improvements to come. We still need your contributions
The API Briefing: Test Your JSON Reading Skills with the Peace Corps Countries and Regions API
The Peace Corps just released a new dataset that lists all of the countries and regions Peace Corps volunteers serve. The API is RESTful and uses the JSON format. You have read in earlier columns about the different data formats for APIs and how to read the data presented by an API. As a refresher,
Keeping Peace Corps Volunteers Healthy, One Text at a Time
Today, refilling your medicine cabinet with bandages and over the counter medicine from your local drugstore may seem like a trivial task, but for Peace Corps volunteers working in remote villages around the world, this task can be much more challenging. As we take steps to forge a 21st century
Getting to Work for the American People
Over the last 6 months, 18F has embarked on a mission to transform the way the U.S. Government builds and buys digital services. We’re currently working with more than half a dozen agencies to help them deliver on their missions in a design-centric, agile, open, and data-driven way. How do we say yes to a
The API Briefing: RealTrack – How Hackathons Help Create Apps from APIs
Once a federal agency releases an API, there are several ways they can be used in apps. The most common method is through hackathons. Hackathons are where an agency or agencies present the API(s) and invite developers to create prototype apps. The apps
Is It Tweet-Worthy?
The Web now contains over 1.51 billion pages of content, according to WorldWideWebSize.com. That’s a lot of reading material, and a lot of content competing with yours for attention. People won’t waste time (even a few seconds) on an article that doesn’t matter to them in some way—not when there are so many other interesting
4 Ways to Connect, Engage & Expand Your Community with Google+ Hangouts
When you think about your community, you may think about your neighborhood, your city, your office or the organizations and activities you’re involved in. The Peace Corps has many of the characteristics of a community, however our reach spans the entire globe. Because we need to regularly connect
5 Things Every Federal Recruiter Should Know About LinkedIn
Some people think LinkedIn is only for active job seekers. Although many of LinkedIn’s 300,000,000+ registered members fit that profile, LinkedIn is also chock-full of passive job seekers—those who have a job but are
The Federal List of #HackforChange Projects
You should be on this list—the current federal government participants in the National Day of Civic Hacking. There are 15 agencies participating in the event, primarily in and around the Washington, D.C., area. This is a fantastic compilation of what agencies are doing, but it is not enough. We need more widespread participation across the country. If
