Congratulations to Carl Haggerty for winning the Leadership Excellence award from the Guardian’s Public Leaders Network! Haggerty is the Digital Communications Manager at GovDelivery client, Devon County Council. He champions and develops the digital agenda within the council and oversees the council’s corporate web presence and intranet. We were lucky to have him as one of the featured speakers at last week’s annual UK Digital Communications Event, Reaching More People.
The Guardian featured an article on Carl last month describing his merits that won him the Leadership Excellence award:
“The award goes to Haggerty for his energy and openness in building on his belief that local government should be both open and digital, and for his work in a part of the country – rural south-west England – not always renowned for its innovation. Haggerty… is responsible for developing ways to engage and involve local people and encourage greater democratic and community participation”.
Carl’s energy for building an open and digital local government was evident in his presentation at “Reaching More People” where he spoke about the current state of local government. While organisations are facing the challenges of moving to digital services, Carl also said there’s a huge opportunity right now in public sector communications. “We still have a huge role to play in terms of providing public information”, Carl said. Ensuring that communications are designed with a “user-driven” mentality is one of the top priorities in the changing digital landscape.
In his presentation, he noted, “There’s a shift for us to think about how we really focus on user needs not just assuming that someone turns up on a council’s home page and then starts there and navigates through some kind of glorious organisational structure. But actually it’s about putting the user first and the organisation is kind of irrelevant in that point. If we have a role to play to provide public information we should do it. If we have a role to provide a service we should do it. And if we have a clear role to provide information and advice that help people find services in their local community we should do it”.
Carl reviewed three main principles that are “reusable” across organisations for communicating with audiences. Communications should be:
- User-driven and evidence based
- Targeted and personalised
- Digital by Design
The idea of moving to a self-service, self-help communications strategy is one that Devon County Council has been successfully putting into practice. If you’d like to hear more from Carl and his tips on developing an “open by default, digital by design” government communications strategy watch his presentation here.
Congratulations to Carl on the award and an engaging presentation last week! You can follow Carl or the Devon County Council on Twitter or visit the council’s website to learn more about what they are doing to improve their digital agenda.