Council websites should model themselves on community Internet hubs such as MySpace, according to a senior government adviser.
Dr Peter Blair, the senior adviser on local e-government at the Department for Communities and Local Government, told the LGCommunications conference in Birmingham last week that councils must take a fresh approach to web development.
Dr Blair said: ‘Let’s begin to take the best of the private sector’s approach in people’s everyday lives. We need to pick up what works on the Internet.
‘We should really tap into people’s lifestyles.’ He cited the MySpace website as a successful way of including a diverse community of people.
‘The challenge is to have communications which talk to everybody, both those who are socially-excluded and the wider population. Councils are good at understanding people’s needs. What we need to get better at is understanding their preferences in terms of information,’ he said.
He warned authorities would have to change with limited resources. ‘We do need to use the money in a very targeted way to achieve the changes that we want,’ he said. ‘If we really want to get people on board, we’ve got to get service-specific. It’s using marketing in a more effective way – not promoting leisure services.’
Dr Blair also warned councils were starting from a low base. ‘We found people had a low degree of awareness of what their council did. For a lot of high level services, including education, people weren’t aware their council was involved,’ he said.
Nick Johnson, director of policy and public sector at the Commission for Racial Equality, urged councils to create media campaigns targeted to specific areas in divided communities. ‘We need more imagination in the places where people interact,’ he said.
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