City of Morgan Hill Communications Assessment

Action Steps o Be mindful of opportunities to enroll people in Constant Contact when they provide the City with their email information. o Also consider opportunities to mine all sources of emails in the City to add emails to the Constant Contact database. Such action should be reviewed by the City Attorney for permission. Potential examples: speaker registration cards at council meetings, people registered for online water bill payment, people registered with the trash hauler, and emails in the business license database. o Leverage the City phone system’s on-hold recording as an opportunity to communicate important City messages. Keep messages short (less than 15 seconds) and digestible. o Establish an Email Governance Policy that outlines the principles of, and responsibilities for, the use of Constant Contact. The Policy may include requirements for email record- keeping, disclosure, security, etiquette and utilizing Lists. o Consider the benefits of City Departments utilizing Nixle more often for quick notifications to residents, as opposed to only the Police Department using the platform. o Regardless of whether the City decides to use Nixle more, there should be an ongoing campaign to get residents to register for notifications. o Upload the Constant Contact email address database to Facebook to create a “Custom Audience” to better target that audience with Facebook Ads. o When City Hall visitors connect to wi-fi, the screen that shows a confirmation message could include an option to sign up for the City’s emails. 8. Communications Metrics: Measure What Matters Outside of the Recreation division, Morgan Hill staff does not regularly report on available metrics for a number of the City’s Communications platforms. For example, City management and City Council rarely hear about data on website activity, social media successes, or the impact of physical collateral/mailers. Collecting and reviewing these metrics is important, but so too is converting the data into actionable steps for management. Action Steps o Annotate the Piwik data on a consistent basis to provide greater context to observed spikes and ‘valleys’ in website traffic. This will create institutional knowledge and enable a team to look back and understand spikes and trends in the content. o Provide a quarterly metrics report and narrative along with that report that looks at the major trends and points of interest in City Communications based upon the available data. o Comments should identify surprises, spikes and timing around other media activity or paid advertising. o Possible metrics include: visits, unique visitors, traffic/referral source, geographic origin, platform used, frequently accessed content, and clickthroughs to other content. o Identify metrics that will be useful to each department and explain to those departments why they are relevant. Consider isolated reports on web traffic that focus on specific department’s webpages.

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