When the coronavirus became a pandemic in March, Finnish health agency THL saw a 560% spike in their traffic and a 25x increase in the amount of direct feedback they received.

In the information age, people turn to the internet with their high-stakes questions. Public institutions likewise turn to their own websites to host important, accurate answers for the citizens they serve.

Your institution may find that typical analytics tools don’t tell you what you really need to know: how informative is your content? 

To answer that question, communications teams need to democratize their content.

'Voice of the customer'? Try 'voice of the citizen'.

Let’s repurpose a business term known as the voice of the customer, or VoC.

Businesses look to analytics tools and surveys to capture the VoC. But, as a business, their motive is to understand how customers feel about the product and how they move through the sales or customer service pipelines.

Public institutions operate with a different motive. They are trying to be as informative for their citizenry as possible, because those citizens already pay.

You’re looking to garner trust and encourage engagement. These metrics can’t be measured by merely observing user behavior on your site -- instead, you have to ask. This way, you capture the voice of the citizen.

React & Share’s analytics tool sets you up to target trust and engagement measurements instead of revenue and conversions. Readers select reactions to a question, set by you, and send direct feedback to you.

Right tool, right job

Motive changes everything. You can’t parse Google Analytics’ view counts and bounce rates if you need to know how valuable your readers found your content -- you also don’t have the time to fiddle with data queries.

Hotjar, another popular analytics tool, won’t work either. It tracks user mouse behavior around your site, but that still is more useful for tracking conversions, user experience, or other business focused metrics than informativeness.

What’s missing from these tools -- and what React & Share gives your readers -- is direct interaction. It’s simple really: ask your readers if they’ve been informed, and they’ll tell you.

Remember THL? In the first week they activated direct feedback, they received 149 direct, anonymous messages through our buttons. By the next month, that number had almost reached 1000. Their readers were always ready to give feedback, they just didn’t have the option.

In other words, they couldn’t vote.

Prepare now, because traffic isn't going to slow down

Who is aging into civic engagement and responsibility in the next few years?

Millennials are, and after that, Gen Z is. These are digital natives, people who have been plugged into the internet since childhood. For them, it’s like a second brain. As a millennial myself, I can assure you the search engine is the first thing I turn to when I want to know anything.

This graph from Pew Research tells you what you already know:

But I’m well aware that with the world’s information at my fingertips, so is the world’s misinformation.

Sign up for a free trial and try React & Share out. Show these digital gurus you’re one of the institutions that’s ready to listen.