The Connect to Your Council campaign of radio and press advertisements, sponsored by the Department for Communities and Local Government, was designed to spread awareness of "e-government" services such as reporting fly-tipping online. It advises people to channel their requests through www.direct.gov.uk, a website set up by the Cabinet Office and now run by the Central Office of Information to handle all citizens' transactions with government.
One service specifically promoted by the campaign, schools information online, "might have seen an increase of up to 1.25% as a result of the campaign," SocITM Insight concluded.
The figures, collected from 59 council websites, show that Directgov lags far behind commercial search engines as a first port of call to government.
While referrals from Directgov rose threefold after the campaign, fewer than 10% of visitors found their local authority through the site. Most (53%) relied on a commercial search engine, while 16% guessed the website address.
Individual authorities confirmed this phenomenon. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London says that the number of referrals from www.direct.gov.uk has increased sevenfold this year - but the central portal was the source of only 700 of the 97,000 unique visitors its website handled in August.
The government says it is encouraged by the growth in numbers of people who know services are available electronically. Angela Smith, minister for local e-government said: "The whole aim of the campaign was to encourage public awareness. It appears to have been successful."
Under the Cabinet Office's "transformational government" strategy, Directgov is to become the main channel for communication with officialdom, replacing many of the 3,000 or so existing government websites. Since early this year, users have been able to "deep link" from Directgov to specific services run by their councils. The fact that most citizens identify with Google or their council rather than the Cabinet Office apparently comes as a surprise to Whitehall.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Michael Cross
Quelle/Source: Guardian Unlimited, 12.10.2006
