On 5/7, we asked the following questions:

1. When someone asks you ‘what company do you work for?’ what do you answer?

2. When you answer the phone, what company name do you use?

Staff meeting poll

The responses

Other comments

• "I spell it out b/c HIC gets associated with the surf shop"
• "The company that builds the ehawaii.gov sites"
• "HIC. Developer of Hawaii.gov"
• "We run the states portal website and develop online apps for the government"
• "A company that does state web apps"

Other comments

• "I say that my company is a contractor for the state. I don’t give names."
• "I do not state the name when answering the phone."
• "I don't specifically state the company name - if specifically asked, I say HIC."

There are a few secretive folks

Question time:

How do YOU say it... and why?

Which name do you think our partners best know us as?

Partners

Let's take a look at some visuals

Visuals

Press Release

So what are we actually doing?

Let's look at the findings

Let's look at the findings

Email signatures

• Hawaii Information Consortium
• Hawaii Information Consortium, LLC
• ehawaii.gov
• ehawaii.gov - Hawaii's state internet portal
• eHawaii.gov - Internet Portal Partner with the Aloha State
• eHawaii.gov
• www.ehawaii.gov
• (Some have contact info but no company name at all)

names used in sigs

• Only 7 have our company name as a clickable link.

• All are missing a call to action.

• Some confidentiality statements are missing or text is changed.

• There are folks in partner facing roles who don't even have a signature (!!)

Email signatures

• Does everyone have a voicemail on their work phone?
  • 71% Yes
  • 29 % No (includes 3 with no phones)

Voicemail Greetings

• Company names used
  • none
  • "ehawaii dot gov"
  • "ehawaii guv"
  • HIC
  • Hawaii Information Consortium

Voicemail Greetings

• 7 had a canned response. "The person at extension ##, is unavailable. BEEP!"
• 1 phone rang 1:22 min before VM picked up
• 1 has Karthiks voicemail (circa 2010?!)
• 1 male has a greeting in another female office members voice (not a canned message).
  • If someone was trying to call a man and they got a womans voicemail that didn't identify by name whose phone it was, why would they leave a message?
• 16 don't even use a company name in their voicemail:
  • 11 - no greeting
  • 5 - have VM but not company name

Voicemail Greetings

• Of CS/admins, 6 of 6 have a greeting.
• Of PMs, 2 of 5 have a greeting.
• Of PLs, 5 of 5 have a greeting.
• Of Devs, 3 have no phone. Of the 11 with phones, 5 have voicemails (sys admins, ux, testing and cosner)
• Of Mgrs, 6 of 6 have a greeting.
• Almost everyone uses 'ehawaii.gov' when identifying the company
  • Some say 'ehawaii dot gov'
  • Others say 'ehawaiigov' as one word

Findings from other portals

Portals

Other portals

• What company names do other portals go by?
  • STATE Interactive (19)
  • STATE Interactive Network (1)
  • STATE Information Network (1)
  • NICUSA, STATE Division (3)
  • STATE NICUSA, LLC (1)

• Other poor souls with consortium in the name
  • Arkansas Information Consortium, LLC (1997)
  • Kansas Information Consortium, LLC (1992)
  • Idaho Information Consortium, LLC (2000)

  • Vermont Information Consortium, LLC (2006)

Other portals*

• Every portal I reviewed used their program name as their public name (aka eHawaii.gov)
• Little to no interaction between company name and program name from portal site
• Most social media is branded 'official website for the state' info
• All have different tones (fun to stodgy)
• We are the only ones to contend with two domains - eHawaii.gov and Hawaii.gov

*I did not look at every portal, just a sampling of portal homepages.

• Concentrated effort by our company to become eHawaii.gov in 2002
• eHawaii.gov replaced eHawaiiGov.org as the portals official domain
• Pronunciation likely changed from "ehawaiiguv" to ehawaii DOT gov
• Purposeful effort to retain Hawaii.gov separately

2000 | 2007 | 2009* | 2012 | 2013

*The portal moved to using Hawaii.gov instead of eHawaii.gov

Historical findings

• Contract names used:
  • "Internet portal manager and services provider"
  • "Internet portal"
  • "The portal"
• Contract awarded to: Hawaii Information Consortium (not our DBA)
• Last RFI didn't even mention eHawaii.gov

What our contract says

So why is any of this a problem?

Problem

The problem is inconsistency in having multiple identities as a company

 having multiple

Identities

INCONSISTENCY IN

How many companies out there can you ask 3 people the name of the place they work and receive 3 different answers?

#1: It's weird

Multiple identities hurts our image

• We are in the relationship business.
• Administrations change every 4-8 years.
• Which means high turnover of partners.
• More work for us to actively promote multiple identities.

#2: Name recognition

What happens if we lose the rfp and no longer have use of the ehawaiigov name?

#3: Ownership

We're good at being in the privileged contract holder position. Work is in abundance. Most partners come to us to avoid RFP. But when we bid on RFPs, we rarely win.

We need to become more competitive and sell our strengths.

#4: RFP (& Reinvention?)

Now is the time to decide who we want to be and set the tone going forward.

Ok. So we know it's a problem. How do we fix it?

How Do we fix it?

Ok. So what's next?

Next?

• Standardized email signatures
• Standardized voicemail greetings
• New HIC site
  • Portfolio + stories
  • Add webcms/volunteer
  • Set up a .com domain
  • New content

• Social media
  • Refresh all accounts
  • SM plan
  • Adjust all text and company information to be consistent
• Migrate emails in to Mailchimp
• More frequent PR

Work in progress