The project is now organising a series of events to be held throughout England next March aimed at local authority marketing and communications staff in order to share its findings that 46% of the adult population of England is ready and waiting to use e-channels - the only thing stopping them is lack of awareness.
Meanwhile the e-citizen website will be further developed and refined to make it easy to use and an essential website for market and communications practitioners to visit. The main focus will be an online handbook. This will be a one stop shop for everything marketing and comms officers need to run marketing and comms campaigns - advice and guidance and a ‘how to' guide.
Additional market research will also be undertaken to get further details about what citizens want from e-channels.
Norman Mellor, head of communications and research at Norwich, has been invited to sit on the programme board to oversee the campaign. Said Mellor, "Norwich City Council is thrilled to have been chosen to lead the next phase of e-Citizen work. It fits very neatly into improvements we're making in Norwich to make services more customer focused.
“The National Projects has been a truly innovative programme and it's fantastic to be so closely involved."
The e-citizen National Project was the first comprehensive research project of its kind in the world to define what citizens want from e-government and how best to drive take up. The research found that people want to use e-channels such as the Internet, mobile phone and digital TV, that they respond positively to marketing communications campaigns and this leads to increased satisfaction with their council.
Through the work of the e-Citizen National Project, Norwich will partner the ODPM to develop a major national take-up marketing campaign for early 2006.
Quelle: eGov monitor, , 07.12.2005
