Our Blog

Two weeks ago, we discussed the research and findings that ultimately led to the decision to change our name. Today, we’ll talk about how we chose USAGov.

In our last post, we introduced the Federal Front Door project and briefly described a six-week discovery phase, in which we set out to better understand how the general public feels about and interacts with the federal government, so that we can design and build products that improve people’s experience across government agencies.

They ranked among our top three most popular emails in 2015.

The first phase of our partnership with Facebook included Facebook "megaphones" being rolled out in a handful of states with rapidly approaching voter registration deadlines. Facebook's megaphone is a featured box that is displayed at the top of all user's News Feeds. (You may recall seeing these after certain disasters giving users the option to quickly donate to Red Cross or other organizations).

One of the most important rights of American citizens is the right to vote.This is why we were excited to launch Vote.USA.gov in September 2015, and why we are continuing our efforts to make it simple for Americans to register to vote. Thousands of sites link to USA.gov as the official source of government information and services. Beginning this week, Facebook is reminding its users of state voter registration deadlines and linking prominently to Vote.USA.gov to help users complete the registration process. Users can also share their registration status with friends and family, which can be a powerful tool in influencing others to register.

There are 11.7 million + reasons to be on Twitter - the approximate number of Hispanics in the U.S. who are using the platform. And out of those 11.7 million, 43% tweet in English and in Spanish. Hispanics over index their counterparts when it comes to digital technologies and services, but how do you reach them and target your messages via Twitter chats?

Visitors to USA.gov searched for over 10,000 different words or phrases in 2015. Many of these terms are different, but have similar meanings—like jobs and careers. We grouped these terms into categories and sub-categories in order to get a larger view of what people want from the government. The most popular search topics this year were related to:

Exploring and capturing interesting government careers is at the heart of Kids.gov’s content marketing strategy. Original scripting, curating through our various publishing channels, and promoting become the lifecycle of every video that we create.

Over the last several months, staff from General Service Administration’s USAGov and 18F teams have been talking to Americans around the country about the good, the bad, and the ugly of interacting with their federal government. The goal of the research is to gain a better understanding of how we can build a better "front door" to the federal government by building new digital services and enhancing existing ones.

The government, and its services, are complicated to navigate. USAGov is working to change that. Over the years, we’ve evolved from providing information in print and launching a web portal to answering people's questions on social media and embracing content marketing. We serve as a guide to government information and services, and we are doing it in both English and Spanish.