For the past 1.5 years, we at Tech Conjurer have been working as the official outreach partners for the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.
In this article, I list down what we learnt while working on the project of Outreach Management for a Government Institution – KMC

Lesson 1: For a government institution a social media platform like Facebook with its huge userbase is the perfect platform for outreach just like any News Media Channel gives a way of outreach

When we were tasked with the outreach management for a government institution like Kolkata Municipal Corporation(KMC) our preferred platform of choice was pretty simple.
Facebook.
Facebook already had a huge chunk of the netizens of the city of Kolkata on its platform. All we had to do as facilitators of communication, is to make sure the communication which the KMC wanted to do through news outlets, was also being carried out on its owned media channel – the Official Page of Kolkata Municipal Corporation.
When we started our work, there was a around 14,000+ people who were following the page of Kolkata Municipal Corporation, from there we used to get an organic reach of 840+ people.
From there we have been able to grow the owned media channel of Kolkata Municipal Corporation to 85000+ where now organically we are able to reach 5100+ citizens of Kolkata every time there is a communication done through the official Facebook page of Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

That is essentially a rise of viewership of 507% over the course of 1.5 years. That’s the increase in the number of eyeballs we get, whenever we post anything on the official page of Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

Slowly, yet surely, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation is creating its own media channels through which citizens can be communicated to, much like how a media channel does so with its newspaper advertorial or news channel editorial.

Lesson 2: Government institutions like Kolkata Municipal Corporation should be having verified social profiles, or else the citizens would never feel comfortable in reaching out over digital platforms thus making digital adoption very slow

When we first took over as the outreach partners for Kolkata Municipal Corporation, we noticed an anomaly. There were 3 pages of Kolkata Municipal Corporation, all created at different times, by different people. There was a problem over here. The citizens who searched for Kolkata Municipal Corporation found 3 pages, with the same name & didn’t know which one is the official Facebook page of KMC.

We decided to act quickly & got 1 single page verified (blue tick) which would represent KMC’s official Facebook page.
We had to communicate constantly with the team of Facebook to furnish all the documents required to get the Facebook page verified.
After doing so we also implemented an official social mail ID through which citizens can reach out to us to get a reply from Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

This verification process helped us in 2 ways
1. To show the citizens that there is a verified Facebook Page of KMC, which can be trusted & communicated with
2. Having a social mail ID through which citizens could reach out to us, gave the citizens a space where they could send in their queries & complaints which were then forwarded to respective departments. The departments through us, communicated back to the citizens, thus making the citizens believe, that at the other end of the official Facebook page of KMC, there was someone listening to the citizens & answering back to them. This inherently has made the citizens of Kolkata more active in reaching out to KMC through its official Facebook page.

Lesson 3: Advertising department of Kolkata Municipal Corporation run advertisements for tax collection & revenue on TV, newspaper & Radio ads only. With increased visibility & owned channel approach, social platforms like Facebook & Twitter are fast catching up thereby reducing ad cost for the advertising department of KMC

Revenue generation along with tax collection are one of the more important departments under a municipal corporation body.
During the campaign of Waiver Scheme 2020, we strategized a plan to showcase how the citizen can avail online services of Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s Property & Tax waiver schemes. Along with discussions held with the officials at the advertising dept. of KMC, we identified citizens who are the “perfect tax payer segment citizens” and designed a campaign to reach out to them.
Through the official Facebook page of KMC & with the help of digital ads we reached out to people informing them about the several benefits which Waiver Scheme 2020 brings with it.

Through a carefully created digital funnel we ensured more than 4lakh people interacted with our digital entity & the total revenue collected through our content was upwards of Rs. 2CR.

We also integrated the campaign as a 360-outreach program, wherein both TVC & Radio Ads were created from our end which got an overall viewership of more than 1CR people across all channels.

The key aspect over here being – while the TV ad cost was upwards of about 50 lakh, the social campaigns media buying was much more targeted & costed 1/10^th of the TV advertisements.

Over a period of time our efforts to make the official Facebook Page of KMC an owned media channel for KMC helped our client to not only reduce media buying cost, but also effectively target non-residential citizens hailing from Kolkata.

Lesson 4: AI driven targeted advertisements on the basis of geography or any other metric has been made possible, which could never have been thought off through traditional media outlets

In traditional media outreach such as TV, Newspaper and/or radio the geography of distribution of content is limited to the distribution
of the media network. For e.g., if an advertisement is being run on a regional media channel, the distribution of the content happens very much regional in nature.
On the other hand, with targeted advertising tools available to us, digital advertisements can be shown to a much wider variety of audience.  Depending upon what is the end goal of media outreach, media buying funnels are created to target audience which gives a very positive return on ad spending.

Practical example – Through a set of carefully created content the Facebook Page of KMC was able to reach non-residential citizens of Kolkata, presently residing in the other metro cities of India with the communication & benefits of Property tax waiver scheme 2020.
This would never have been possible to through one single TV network, the ad cost of which would be considerably much higher comparable to digital media buying cost.

Lesson 5: 2-way communication between citizens & government officials can be facilitated with a few simple steps.

When we first started working with the Kolkata Municipal Corporation the first campaign we implemented was “Youth For Kolkata”. This was a Facebook Live event, in which the Mayor himself, came live on Facebook to interact with the youth of the city. A carefully curated set of questions were crowd-sourced from the Youth of Kolkata which got answered through the Facebook Live event. The response that we got, was overwhelming to say the least. People started connecting with us over the digital channels thereafter so much, that we had to implement a mechanism of storing all the queries/complaints we get from citizens in a structured manner.
That upon further segmentation was communicated to the government officials according to the departmental enquires/complaints.
Once the government officials filed in their responses, we on behalf of KMC, communicated the same to the citizen, thus building a 2-way communication bridge between the citizens of Kolkata & KMC.

Lesson 6: In a disaster management situation, real time
updates to the netizens can actually reduce panic among the average citizen

2020, marked a very significant year for us. For the first time, as outreach partners we were facing a disaster management crisis situation both in terms of Amphan & the Covid crisis. As facilitators of 2-way communication, we understood, how important it is to communicate with the citizens of Kolkata, all the major steps which are being taken by the KMC. Regular & timely updates during the amphan crisis & constant updation about the vaccination centers &/or testing centers gave the citizens a space where they were getting verified information without leaving their homes. This inherently helped us identify the weak spots where people were reaching
out to us over Facebook for help & we communicated that with the higher officials of KMC.

Quick steps were taken to fill up the gap from the government’s side, which we in turn communicated back with the citizens. There are countless people whom we could never have known, who got helped from the KMC, just because they knew someone was there at the end of the Facebook Page, who would listen to the problems of the citizen & try to solve them. Instead of people using social media to criticize the civic body of KMC, we got positive response from the citizens just because they were being constantly communicated to, thus reducing the overall panic in them during such difficult times.

Lesson 7: Government institutions like Kolkata
Municipal Corporation is just starting to adopt the digital transformation
curve, & it is just the beginning

When the vaccine rollout started, we understood 1 simple thing.
People are to be communicated in the way they are used to communicate, and the process of registering for a vaccine shot, should be made fairly simple, to get a high volume of people willing to take the vaccines. Keeping that in mind, we actively worked in the integration of the “vaccination WhatsApp chatbot” which provided citizens a very easy mechanism of booking their vaccination slots through the official WhatsApp number of KMC in just a few simple steps.

For any government body, it takes a significant amount of time, to adopt the latest technology for implementing different processes.
Through WhatsApp Chatbot, the KMC was able to not only drive more citizens to take up the vaccine shot, but also set a precedence in their digital transformation curve as a government institution.

Lesson 8: No government body, works in silo. Not only does outreach management for a government institution require inter-departmental co-ordination but also intra-institutional co-ordination

At any given point of time, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation is responsible for the smooth functioning & administration of the city of Kolkata. This includes constant communication & co-ordination between various departments within the KMC and also with departments which are outside the KMC, like the Health Department or State Government. During our time of working with the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, we saw firsthand how intra-departmental communication is so crucial in getting success for any campaign. Be it a political election-oriented scheme or a disaster management campaign to help the citizens. Our team seamlessly integrated with the inter & intra departmental teams of the government institutions to facilitate effective communication with the citizens of Kolkata.
This also gave us a valuable lesson in management, where all departments were communicating perfectly with each other, albeit through us being the facilitators of communication.
This has created a better bond between all the government officials we have interacted during our project thus making the point all the more concrete. Nothing constructive & positive can be achieved in silo. We all have to work together to achieve something good and navigate the difficult times we are experiencing in 2021

Lesson 9: There are some problems which a citizen may be facing, which in reality would require a significant amount of time to be resolved, but that too if communicated properly to the citizens, can work wonders for how the government body is looked upon as. An institution which listens to its citizens

Talk to Mayor is a weekly LIVE Facebook Content which was started in 2019. The purpose of the project, was to understand what the citizens have problem with & they can for an hour talk directly with the Mayor of their city. The range of problems which we received through talk to mayor was multi-faceted to say the least.

At the end of each Talk To Mayor, regular press conferences were held to give an update of the week to the news media. A lot of the problems were of such nature, which would require a good amount of time to be rectified. Each one of the complainants were updated upon their status of progress. Citizens were directed to meet government officials either at the KMC and/or at the local civic office to get their problems resolved. The hard work put in behind Talk to Mayor only bearded fruits when calls started coming from happy citizens, thanking the mayor how the problems which were raised over a phone call has gotten resolved.

As facilitators of communication we feel just a little happy knowing, that our efforts of connecting the citizens with the government is slowly yet surely bearing fruits. To top it all off, we even got a retweet from the great Mr. Amitabh Bachhan saying how Bombay Municipal Corporation should try and do mass sanitization more like the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. If we were not communicating enough with the citizens of our city, we wouldn’t have been able to come this far in terms of achieving a 2-way digital communication engine.

Lesson 10: Only a select few get the chance to handle an Outreach Management Program for a government institution like KMC. If not done at the highest precision level, we would be letting our fellow citizens down

We at Tech Conjurer, take absolute pride in what we do. Having worked with the KMC for the past 1.5 years, in our own humble ways we have been trying to be facilitators of communication on behalf of KMC. We believe if we do not do our job with utmost dedication, then a lot of citizens would not get the opportunity to talk to the KMC.

On a day-to-day basis, we see how top government officials along with their team have way too many things on their plate when it comes to maintaining a smooth administration of a city like Kolkata, even then they are working tirelessly to do so.

People say, all experiences make us learn invaluable lessons in life. Managing an office of 7-10 people seems difficult. Imagine how it should feel, when it comes to managing the running of an entire city. We at Tech Conjurer feel proud to be associated with the Kolkata Municipal Corporation as their outreach partners & feel the lessons we learnt while working with the KMC, are not only work lessons, but life lessons.

If you liked reading this article, you may also like to read what I learnt while working as a management consultant with an educational institution over here – https://debduttobanerjee.com/2021/04/27/what-i-learnt-while-working-in-the-education-sector-as-a-branding-amp-marketing-consultant/

A lookback of what we learned & lived for the past 1.5 years