Our Blog

The Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) at GSA is a two-year Pathways program for recent graduates to transition from college to a career in government. Each participant rotates through up to seven different offices within the agency, working closely with team members and learning about the work before being permanently placed. The program offers networking opportunities, in-depth trainings on technical and leadership skills, and previews a variety of career tracks.

Here are some key things I've learned while leading the outreach team — from sprint lengths and editorial calendars, to meeting overload and how to learn to lead more effectively.

When the content team wrapped up researching and drafting the Disability Services section, our UX team did two usability tests to determine how the new information should be organized in order to make it as easy to find as possible.

Creating a single piece of content is one thing, but creating a whole new section for our website is quite another endeavor — especially when it needs to address a gap in government information. It takes time and resources to produce the content, test the sections, and build the infrastructure. This blog post is the first in a series about that process.

Last year, I shared a new KPI that we were piloting — the content efficiency metric. 

Social media is a key part of USAGov’s outreach efforts, which aim to connect the public with government information and services quickly and easily. As we all know, social media is continually evolving, and we try to adapt accordingly.

This blog was originally posted on HIV.gov on May 29, 2018.

The Consumer Action Handbook (Handbook) and its Spanish counterpart,the Guía del Consumidor (Guía), have been mainstays of USAGov since the 1990s. However, life as a consumer has changed drastically since these books began. To understand the changing consumer landscape, a cross-functional group from USAGov conducted a study of the scope of these publications. We wanted to answer several questions:

Over the course of tax season, our content and marketing teams worked together to help our audience better understand the ins and outs of filing taxes and other important steps in the process. We collaborated on messaging for our various platforms including targeted email and social media. We covered many important tax topics, from finding out if you qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit to avoiding refund scams.

Content on the USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov websites provides information on many different government benefits, services, and programs. We group the content into various taxonomy buckets to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. But after listening to user feedback, we realized that content about different programs wasn’t always written in the same style and format, which made it hard for people to find what they were looking for across topics.