City of Morgan Hill Communications Assessment

• 30.3% of Morgan Hill, CA citizens are speakers of a non-English language and the most common non-English language is Spanish (Spanish or Spanish Creole - 19.3%). 1 All safety and health messages are sent out to the community in both English and Spanish. Otherwise, there does not seem to be a formal policy or decision tree on when communications should be sent/published in a language other than English. • The City Manager and other Department leaders meet in a Weekly Leadership Huddle, with a set agenda. Maureen Tobin uses this time to extract information from teammates that could be used in City communications, but “Communications” is not a regular agenda item. Strategy & Policy • The City Manager has empowered a hybrid Communications model where each Department manages its own external communications (often with Maureen's guidance and input), supplemented by Maureen managing the City’s overall strategic communications. As of this writing, Maureen has begun taking steps to establish a “Communications Team.” • Currently, there are no formal policies or guidelines that define when it is appropriate to generate a “News Flash” post on the website, adjust the home page image ‘carousel,’ send a Constant Contact email, issue a Press Release or post to social media. Maureen manages all these tasks and uses her judgment. • 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.

1 https://datausa.io/profile/geo/morganhill-ca

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