Government 2.0: Digital Measurement = Better Management
Dan Lackner
xEarly in my career, I had the distinct pleasure to work side by side with John Little, Institute Professor and the Chair of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management. John is the quintessential quantitative marketer, and is widely considered to be one of the founders of marketing science with his work in the area of promotional spending and marketing mix models for consumer packaged goods.
One of John’s favorite sayings was “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” He consistently imprinted this mantra on his students and those of us that worked side-by-side with him. We, in turn, took this message to the market and to our customers and used numbers, facts, and data to substantiate advertising and promotion spending, lend credence to hunches, and generally separate the truth from fiction when it came to marketing strategy.
In a recent open government conference, I sat upright when one of the keynote speakers uttered those same words, impressing upon the audience that it was not enough to embrace web 2.0 strategies. One had to measure and quantify the impact of those initiatives. To ignore measurement was to ignore the truth about one’s initiatives.
Federal and state agencies and departments are investing more heavily in their web presence, making their sites more citizen-centric and easier to interact with. Are these efforts working? Are they meeting the needs of the constituents? Is the public receiving value? The current administration's focus on transparency and automation has elevated many of these concerns and they are now receiving significant attention.
Comscore is a vital part of that value chain and brings accountability and precise measurement to these digital initiatives. Over the past five years, we have worked closely with MedlinePlus, a service of the National Library of Medicine/NIH. MedlinePlus has a long-standing goal to strengthen its role as a leading source of unbiased online medical information for general consumption. Other leaders in this space include WebMD, EverdayHealth, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). While not competing directly for advertising revenue, government, not-for-profit, and commercial web sites do compete for visitors, session engagement and share of mind – these metrics are among those used as benchmarks for gauging MedlinePlus’s success.
Comscore provides both syndicated data and consulting services to MedlinePlus for actionable, multi-dimensional insight into the success of their website and traffic to their commercial counterparts. MedlinePlus and other NIH.gov website teams develop their web content and create strategies to drive traffic based in part on these results.
In the most recent ACSI E-Government Satisfaction Index, MedlinePlus’ website was in the top five of all measured government sites, with an overall satisfaction score of 85. This rivals the satisfaction score of many of the best commercial sites.
Other government agencies working with Comscore are embracing measurement as part of their Internet initiatives, including the Department of Defense, the National Institute of Health, the Internal Revenue Service, the Postal Service and the Federal Trade Commission. As more agencies adopt the culture of accountability, we can all hope to see a more responsive, citizen-centric government.
John Little would be pleased.