five challenges that face the dvla

Everyone knows the DVLA. They're the Swansea-based bit of government that looks after your driving licence. A simple comms task? No, far from it...

by Victoria Ford

Here at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) we deal with over 130 million customer transactions a year, 67 million of them digitally. 

This digital transformation is set to continue and brings with it a whole set of challenges for us as a communication team. 

My top five? Here goes...

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future govcomms: training, trust and re-training ministers

Alex Aiken, the UK Government's most senior comms through The Guardian asked what the future of government comms should look like. Here's one view.

by Dan Slee

So, what should the future of government communications look like? If you think it's tweeting press releases wearing a One Direction t-shirt you're wrong.

Refreshingly, the UK government has stood up and on The Guardian website admitted it had a good idea. But not a definitive one.

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learning to fly as a solo pr

We like Jo Smith. She's one of life's great people who really knows her stuff. So nine months into her career as a solo public relations operator in the West of Scotland here are some things that have struck her. 

by Jo Smith

It’s nine months since I put years as a full time public sector desk-jockey behind me and set up as a freelance PR consultant.

Going solo isn’t for everyone. But it seems to be working for me. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far...

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help! a pr system wish list

Hello. Can you hear us? We work in pr and we've been waiting for a decent system to evaluate. We've been waiting for some time so we've decided to come up with our own. Okay with you?

by Kate Reynolds

There has long been an understanding in the PR industry that we need to evaluate our achievements and impact. We get this. We know it's critical to evaluate to help us learn and improve, demonstrate our value to our internal stakeholders and report back how investment has made a difference to business objectives. We also know there isn’t one single measure that will do this for us but a balanced scorecard approach looking at our performance over a range of metrics is the way to go. (Check out the Barcelona Principles for background on this.)

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what google+ can offer

After taking a toe-hold of the social market Google+ continues to grow steadily. But what is it? What can it offer?

by Phil Rumens

Around a year ago, I had a discussion about Google+ over lunch. I remember saying that I couldn’t work out what it was for. It didn’t have the simplicity of Twitter, nor did it have the sharing functionality of Facebook, so where did it fit? I didn’t really rate it and couldn’t see the point of the platform.

Since then my opinion has changed.

Google+ has evolved and added what are probably its two best features. The first is Communities, the ability to create open or closed interest groups. The latter has great potential for sharing non-sensitive information (you’d probably want something a bit more secure for personal data) over a wide network based anywhere in the world.

The second is Hangouts, which you can use as an impromptu video chat room or set up as an event and invite people to attend. I’ve done this with LocalGov Digital colleagues and it really fits in with the “Digital by Design” agenda, having a face-to-face chat with people all over the country, without leaving the room. Of course this is nothing new, but it just seems a lot easier to do than other platforms.

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