City of Morgan Hill Communications Assessment

• Some departments and teammates—such as the Economic Development team, the Community Services team, and the Police Department—act autonomously to execute Communications on their own without waiting for approval from the City Manager’s Office. While this has not resulted in any issues to date, Tripepi Smith observed a lack of strategy, policy, long-term planning, or messaging guidelines that tie all Department communications together. • The City has developed multiple tools to help teammates understand the City’s general approach to Communications, such as “Communication Tools for Teammates,” a “CMH Spectrum of Public Participation” graphic, and a “Community Engagement Model Guidebook and Tool Kit.” See Appendix D for the list of documents. Sometimes, though, communication responsibilities fall to teammates who do not have strong Communications backgrounds or much interest in Communications. Website • The City’s website is modern-looking, displays well on mobile devices, is intuitive to navigate as a user, and is fairly easy to update as an admin. • Certain teammates are members of the “Web Team”: staff who have been trained on how to upload content to the website and update webpages. Ultimately, Maureen Tobin is responsible for the website and its content. • The City does not currently have a formal “Website Governance Policy,” which typically outlines an organization's structure of staff and the technical systems, procedures and policies to maintain and manage its website. • The City website has Google Translate enabled, making it accessible to non-English speakers, which Tripepi Smith considers a best practice. Social Media • Certain Departments have demonstrated a willingness to adopt new communication platforms, though the City mostly focuses on Facebook with multiple Facebook Pages. • The City auto-posts the majority of its Constant Contact emails to the City Facebook Page and Twitter Profile, which is not an ideal practice. Facebook, in particular, will prioritize posts created on its own platform vs. third-party tools. • City social media posts are reaching a fraction of their potential audience. This is especially evident on Facebook, where the potential audience of just Morgan Hill residents on Facebook is approximately 24,000 individuals but the City’s main page only has 2,650 Likes/Fans. The largest City-owned Facebook Page (the Morgan Hill Police Department) has approximately 8,700 Likes/Fans. • There are multiple community Facebook Pages and Groups with large memberships. Maureen regularly reads the posts in these spaces and is the only one who officially responds as “the City of Morgan Hill.” Some City staff members and City Council members occasionally read these spaces’ posts, but there is no formal policy to determine whether they can post/respond in these spaces and when it would be appropriate to do so. Media/Press

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