Beyond Cats and Kardashians - Citizens' Maslov Hierarchy of Needs

1. Beyond Cats & Kardashians
How to Build Meaningful
Online Civic Engagement

2. What’s Popular on the Internet?
 Kardashains
 Cats
 Buzzfeed / Huffpost

3. What are you serving?
 Buffet of ice cream, you are serving broccoli
 How do you get people to eat healthy?

4. Hardest thing on internet
 Gaining audience / getting people to care
 Billion dollar skill
 #1 reason civic engagement (or any consumer internet site)
dies is lack of audience

5. Who is the Kim Kardashian of
Gov’t?

6. Are we…
 Building what citizens want?
 Or what we want citizens to want?

7. Popular on gov’t sites
 Crime
 Jobs
 Education
 Weather/snow
 DMV, licenses, permits
 Transit
 Mandatory items & items that affect people individually

8. Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs
Open Data
E-
democracy
NASA,
Parks
Emergency
alerts,
Crime
Jobs,
Benefits

9. So what’s the solution?

10. Engagement Funnel

11. 3 Steps Process
 Build and serve a wide base
 Get them engaged
 Push towards higher value engagements

12. Serve the Base

13. Great Multi-Channel Service
Delivery
 Quickly complete their transaction
 Solve their information needs

14. Get Them Engaged

15. Cross-Promote at high-volume
transactions
INDUSTRY INDUSTRY: GOVERNMENT:
McDonalds: Amazon: Your agency:
“Do you want “Customers who “You may also be
fries with that?” bought this item interested in information
also bought…” from these agencies…”

16. Use Timely Events

17. When They Walk Through Your Door

18. Go where people are

19. Make an Ask

20. Light-Weight Engagement

21. Simple Clear Ask

22. Follow-Up & Celebrate Success

23. Who is your Kardashian?

24. Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs
Open Data
E-
democracy
NASA,
Parks
Emergency
alerts,
Crime
Jobs,
Benefits

25. Your Homework
 Make sure foundation served well
 Optimize high-frequency to ongoing relationship
 Connect high frequency to high value items

27. KNOWLEDGE CYCLE

28. Training, Events, Tools, Infographics
Online Training Sessions In-Person Training Sessions
Guides Infographics

29. Reach out
Steve Ressler
Founder, GovLoop
steve@GovLoop.com
@GovLoop