Congratulations to Rep. Stivers’ office for launching a brand new website! The 15th District of Ohio has a great resource for the Congressman’s work in the district and DC.
Rep. Wilson’s new website features a fresh color scheme and clean layout. It’s very easy for constituents to see recent Member activity through the homepage video section, photo album, and Latest News area. The homepage also includes a survey section which allows the office to get valuable feedback directly from constituents.
I have viewed a significant number of sites over the years in order to stay up with current trends in Congressional websites. In addition to looking for good uses of CMF Gold Mouse recommendations, I also take a look at these sites from a different perspective. One thing I tell people is that the CMF Gold Mouse is one yard stick for success — and we’re very proud of the success our clients have had there — but it is a methodology designed by the CMF that doesn’t necessarily align with every office’s goals for their website. Here are a few cool features that you may consider adding to your website because they will help your constituents feel more engaged with your office.
1. Staff Information. Add staff names and photos to your website to allow constituents put a face with a name. This will make their experience with staff more personal and they may appreciate it.
2. Pictures of the office location. Almost every website has the Google map which is very helpful for getting directions to the offices, but what about an actual photo or a description of the location? Is there anything a constituent needs to be aware of? Is there free parking? Is the building under construction?
3. Short video about casework. How does a constituent get a passport, help with a delayed Social Security payment, or a U.S. flag flown over the Capitol? What’s involved? What is the time commitment? What should I expect, etc. Do people really know the answers to these questions? You could direct constituents to the page on the site that answers these specific questions. If the video lets them know that they should proceed with reaching out to your office, then they can correspond with your office through your contact form.
UPDATE: We received information alerting us that members aren’t allowed to promote any events unless he or she will be attending the event as part of their official business.
We’ve finally reached the end of our Gold Mouse series! The previous two posts in this year’s series primarily covered issues related to beefing up your site’s content, but we can’t stop there. Once you write and post all of the relevant information to your website, you should start thinking abut the best way to present this information to your constituents. Since your Congressional websites serve as an online office of sorts, it’s important that people are able to easily find the information they need on your website. Below are two things you can do to bring some order to your content.
Homepage Analysis
Items on your homepage receive the most attention, but it’s impossible to highlight everything on your homepage without it becoming cluttered. Think about the natural path you would think to follow to find certain pieces of information. Nothing should be “buried” on your website, but highly-trafficked sections should be even easier to find. Check out your web stats to see how people navigate through your website. If you notice that some popular pages aren’t easily found from your homepage, consider making an update to your navigation or Quick Links.
Internal Page Analysis
Your internal pages should follow a consistent organizational structure. Do you have internal navigation links on your sidebars? Have they been updated to reflect the important features of a given section? Perhaps you’ve added a new document type to your website in the past year. Does your internal sidebar reflect this? If you find that your internal sidebars are consistently longer than page content, perhaps you should consider consolidating some pages. Remember, fewer clicks means people can get to information they want faster.
This Wrap Up brings an end to our CMF series, but the work of maintaining your Congressional website doesn’t stop here. We all pay a lot of attention to website content and organization leading up to the awards, but don’t forget that your constituents benefit from a great website all year long! Feel free to reach out to us if you have questions about the CMF Gold Mouse awards or if you have ideas about how we can help you get your site it tip-top shape.
Other posts in this series:
One of our goals here at Fireside21 is to help our clients manage inbound and outbound correspondence in an efficient way so that you can respond to your constituents in a timely manner. We constantly make updates to our CRM platform when we see or hear about a way to help expedite the response turnaround time for your offices.
Our development team has rolled out frequent updates to the CRM platform this year based on client feedback, and you can keep track of these updates in the “What We’ve Been Doing” sidebar of eManager. We’ve rolled out another very exciting update to all CRM accounts. Now, when logging in any kind of correspondence (phone call, email, letter, walk-in meeting) you will be able to upload attachments. This will be particularly useful for:
Rather than having to keep track of those paper records or manually entering in the content of a letter, you can scan them, attach them, and recycle! This will save you time and energy when you need to log anything in and also prevents you from having to pass around pieces of paper along with mail assignments. Now your office can spend less time logging in mail and more time responding. Try it out the next time you log a piece of correspondence–your interns will thank you!
If you have feedback for our platform, hop into our chat room and let us know! As a result of the feedback we’ve received, we have made a number of updates to the platform including last week’s addition of the contact form auto-response email message.