Local governments’ communication with ratepayers could be done better and more cost effectively.

Local governments provide a more diverse range of services within one organisation than any other arm of government: health, education, social welfare, urban planning, recreation, libraries, engineering, environment, parks, refuse disposal and recycling – the list goes on and keeps growing. Consequently, they face unique communication challenges.

I have had the pleasure of working with many local governments over the last twenty years, and I am constantly in awe of their accomplishments and the diversity of their services. But I have been struck by the uneven quality of their communication with their ratepayers. While there are some well-designed communications, many are not. There are too many rates notices that are hard to make sense of, letters that are difficult to understand, websites that are hard to navigate, brochures that don’t explain what to do, and newsletters that provide no news.

The many examples of poor communication alongside the pockets of good work suggest a lack of coherent and effective communication policies, strategies and practices in local government. We have worked with a number of local governments to rectify this, and the results are impressive; but there is much to do.

When we review communication practices in local government, we look for two types of evidence.

First we look at outcomes. Things such as payment patterns, call centre traffic, counter transactions, turnaround times, and complaints handling provide us with good baseline data on current performance and the costs of dealing with poor communication practices.

Second we examine the processes used to develop and monitor communication with ratepayers. Research on communication and information design has provided us with a good deal of evidence about those communication processes which work, and those which don’t.

We can now look at the methods and stages through which any communication has been developed, and spot the likely problem areas. Here is a list of some of the indicators we use – some of these are obvious, but some may surprise you:

• -absence of craft skills in writing and design
• -no evidence of performance
• -use of ‘seals of approval’ such as crystal marks or clarity marks
• -use of focus group and surveys
• -inadequate scoping
• -no performance requirements
• -no benchmarking
• -poor implementation
• -no monitoring.

These are the most common symptoms of a lack of effective communication policies and strategies guiding practice and the presence of poor communication processes and practices. The result is an organisation that is spending too much for unmeasured and probably inadequate outcomes.

Websites have exacerbated these problems in recent times. A simple rule of thumb can be applied. If an organisation started out with a poorly-designed paper system, putting it online makes it worse. Far from improving access to information and services, websites have added an extra burden of complexity and frustration resulting in an overloading of compensatory services such as call centres.

Those of you who are cri members can use our free diagnostic kit, our many case histories, and our services to help you work though what you need to do to improve your communication design processes.

For those of you who are not, joining us might be a good idea.

As part of our ongoing research, we monitor the usability of many websites. Some of these are the websites of CRI corporate members, others are large-scale corporate websites which many people use and depend on.

We are observing a disturbing trend. The usability of many of the sites we monitor is going backwards. Some sites were not very good to start with. But in a number of cases, after major redesigns, their usability has got worse.

Some of the obvious symptoms of this deteriorating usability are:

• -unnecessary use of photographs and flash
• -too many menus and navigational devices
• -poor typographic hierarchy
• -indiscriminate use of lines, boxes, icons and colour.

These are, of course, just the outward symptoms. The consequences are sites that are unnecessarily difficult for people to navigate and use.

Typically, organisations do not know a great deal about the usability of their sites before they go through an expensive redesign, so they are in no position to make a judgement about their website’s usability after the redesign. As a consequence, they cannot tell whether they have got a decent return on their investment (ROI) in the redesign.

Based on our experience with the current generation of websites, we would suggest that an organisation should expect a minimum $10.00 ROI in productivity improvements for every $1 spent on a redesign. If you are a commercial organisation, selling directly to the public, an ROI of $100 for every dollars invested is not an unreasonable expectation.

These large ROIs say something about the poor quality of many current generation websites and how much they could be improved. In some cases, the only reason the websites work at all is because of the ingenuity and perseverance of the people who use them, rather than the skill of the designers who create them.

And judging by some of the recent redesigns we are seeing, web designers are not getting any better at their craft.