HUD's Web Management Operating Procedures

We encourage the Regional Web Managers to contact other public service organizations in their area (other federal, state, and local agencies; housing related nonprofits; etc.) and see if they can organize a "Public Service Web Night" at a local school or shopping mall, where each organization can demonstrate its website for the public. We encourage Web Managers to work with their Public Affairs Officers to find inexpensive ways to promote HUD's web products, such as asking for a free ad on the local public access cable TV stations or local radio stations. Radio stations are required to broaDistrict of Columbiaast a certain number of public service announcements (PSAs) and are always looking for PSA fodder.

And again - we try to tell Web Managers to use the efforts of others to help us with our marketing. If the Housing staff are setting up a booth at the State Fair, ask them to put out a stack of web brochures and promotional items at the booth.

2. Leave a calling card

OK - so you've gone out to the audience and told them about your website. Now what? Give them something to remember us by. We've got great brochures on hud.gov, kiosks, and espanol.hud.gov. We try to make sure each of the Field Offices has a stack of them, and we encourage program managers to take brochures with them to meetings and presentations. If we're aware of meetings or conferences targeting a specific group (e.g., senior citizens), we urge the staff to print out copies of pertinent information from our websites (e.g., "senior citizens" page) to hand out

We purchase promotional items, in addition to the brochures, to help Web Managers and other HUD staff spread the word about our websites.

We urge all HUD managers to make sure our web addresses (both www.hud.gov and espanol.hud.gov) are on everything - stationary, business cards, fax cover sheets, with the office address in the local phone books, HUD ads in the paper or on TV...everyplace we put our address or phone number, we should include our web address.

We also encourage them to put the web addresses in their voice mail messages..."we can't take your call right now but you might want to check our website at www.hud.gov."

3. Train the staff

If HUD staff know how to use HUD's websites, they will be able to help us market them. So that's what we do.

We encourage Web Managers throughout the Department to hold periodic demonstrations in their offices to show employees what's new on the sites and how to use the sites to their advantage.

And we try to tell HUD staff, on a routine basis, how our websites are being received. We share the good news - the more excited HUD staff are about HUD's web products, the more excited they'll be to promote them.

Be sure to tell staff about the "aliases" to our most used web content (see Appendix F). These URL shortcuts can be a great advantage to marketing and training efforts.

Additional guidelines on training staff are available in General Procedures 14.

4. Listen to the audience

Part of marketing is collecting feedback from our audiences so we can improve our products. And one of the most important skills every Web Manager needs is the ability to listen to our audiences. We have found that, if we listen, our audiences will tell us exactly what to do with our websites.

There are lots of ways to "listen." We monitor the webmail that comes in. If people are asking the same questions over and over, maybe we need to make that piece of information more prominent on our website. Or maybe we need to explain it better.

We monitor the statistics. Are people visiting the pages we would expect them to visit? If not, maybe we need to make those pages more prominent.

When we do marketing events, we demo the website and then ask for comments and feedback. People love to be asked for their opinions.

We do focus groups every chance we get. We've found that we can do a very effective focus group, in about a half hour, anywhere we can find a handful of people to listen. That's true both inside HUD, where we invite employees to tell us about hud@work, and outside HUD, where we look for feedback on hud.gov and espanol.hud.gov.

Focus groups really kill two birds with one stone. First, they give us an opportunity to tell people about our websites, show them around a bit, and tell them how we've got it organized. Second, they can produce some great ideas - things we may not have thought about.

Focus groups can be very general - just ask for general impressions. Or we can tailor to some specific problem that we've been having. Maybe there's a particular page that just isn't working for us. Sometimes a focus group can give us the perfect inspiration for fixing the problem.

We do try to keep the group small, so people have a chance to voice their opinions. We take notes, to show them that we care about what they said. And assure them that they won't hurt your feelings - you honestly want to know how to make the product better for them.

You should hold focus groups with the audiences you are targeting for that particular web product. So if you want feedback on hud.gov, set up a focus group with people outside of HUD. If you want feedback on hud@work, set up a focus group with HUD employees. Guidelines for conducting focus groups are available in Appendix G.

When you conduct focus groups, be sure to share what you learned with your peers and with the Departmental Web Team.

Remember - use the "Tom Sawyer" approach, as you make your marketing plans. Find ways to get other HUD staff to do your marketing for you. But be sure to take credit for every marketing effort you make, whether you did it personally or not!