GONZALES — The City of Gonzales is looking at developing a social media policy and expanding its reach to interact with more residents in ways that serve them.
A survey was conducted, in which community members were asked to give feedback on what they would like as a communication tool.
“One of the recommendations was the adoption of a social media policy,” said City Manager Rene Mendez. “The policy is just to clearly outline the expectations of what we’re going to do when people contact us on Facebook, how do we respond to that.”
The policy speaks to the expectation of city staff; what they can and cannot do.
“We were asked to survey the current state of city communications, do surveys of external and internal stakeholders and come up with these recommendations,” said Spencer Critchley, managing partner of Boots Road Group. “In Gonzales we have lots of different kinds of people living in the city and we need to be able to communicate.”
The goals for communication for Gonzales are to inform the public, to encourage civic engagement, advance the city’s economic development strategy, advance “The Gonzales Way” citywide commitment, and enable efficient effective city operations.
The recommendations for unifying and improving City of Gonzales communications and social media policy is to use popular communication channels. Critchley says the City needs to figure out what communication tool, such as a flyers in popular spots, would work or starting an Instagram account. Providing Spanish content is a definite need though.
One recommendation that Critchley found was to consolidate and rename the Facebook accounts associated with the city. In talking with the people who are active behind the Gonzales websites the more Critchley and his team have found that they are doing good work. Critchley also spoke about creating Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts for the City of Gonzales.
The final recommendation was to use of broadcast emails because the City already has a list of email addresses for residents and business owners in Gonzales.
