Our Blog

For nearly 50 years, USAGov has been working to serve every person and every government agency. Our history has been full of change, and never static as we improve people’s lives by connecting them with the government services and information they need.

One of the 2018 goals for our email outreach efforts was to learn more about our audience. Though in the past we had performed different exercises to do so -- email-level data analysis, content testing, and persona development to name a few -- we decided nothing beats being able to ask questions directly to our subscribers.

When it comes to email marketing, many communicators measure success by growing their number of unique subscribers. But the number of list subscribers isn’t the only metric to track. 

One of our core principles behind the USAGov chatbot is consistent, iterative improvements. We recently released our newest batch of small changes and wanted to share them with you.

USAGov and USAGov en Español offer a wide range of government information and services organized by topics to make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for. But navigating through different sections within our sites could be challenging and overwhelming for our visitors, especially first-time users.

We’ve wanted to try out artificial intelligence (AI) for a few years. We get tons of questions from the public, and wanted to see if automation could help us answer them quicker. We also knew that scams are one of the top tasks for our website and contact center audiences. In late 2018, we blended our exploration of AI and expertise in scams to launch our chatbot.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires federal agencies to create products and information that give employees and members of the public with disabilities access that’s “comparable to the access available to others.” But 45 years in, many teams and organizations across government still struggle to meet this mandate.

After 15 years, GobiernoUSA.gov, the trusted source of government information in Spanish, begins a new era. As part of our fifteen year celebration, we are announcing our new name: USAGov en Español.

The outreach team has been partnering with federal agencies for years to share government information with the public. Recently, we launched our partnership toolkit to demonstrate exactly what our team does, show which agencies we’ve teamed up with in the past, and initiate conversations with potential new partners.

We scheduled an online workshop to discuss how to improve and reorganize our Military and Veterans section. We all were teleworking the day the event was planned, so it became a 100 percent virtual session – which ended up being remarkably successful! We wanted to share some of what we learned to be best practices.