Measured Voice President Jed Sundwall writes “Why We’re a Civic Startup” on the company’s blog to highlight why it applied to the Code for America Accelerator program.
Kudos to him for openly acknowledging Measured Voice’s application, but also articulating a mission-driven motivation, which I believe is important for any business, especially those serving government.
More importantly, Jed sheds light on a fundamental civic need, but also one where there’s currently little market competition: helping government better communicate to citizens.
Jed and I have talked about government communications at length, and I’ve written about this in the past. Unlike founders of many civic startups, he has worked closely with government and gets its culture and inherent challenges. He is truly serious and passionate about this, especially as it pertains to how government can best leverage social media.
From his post:
While there are many social media management tools, none are focused on government, and none focus as closely as we do on the most important component of government social media communications: clear, strategic messaging. As more government organizations are pushed to communicate via social media, we aspire to be the tool agencies choose to develop professional, mission-driven, social media communication teams. Our wildest ambition is to help improve the clarity of language used in public facing government communications.
and:
Our #1 goal as a company is to do work that we’re proud of. If we can help government organizations communicate more effectively with citizens, we’ll improve millions of people’s experiences with the government. The chance to work on these kinds of problems is what gets us out of bed in the morning.
Much of the Gov 2.0/open government movement focuses on data, transparency, open source, apps and other technology solutions without addressing the fundamental challenge of effectively informing the common citizen and meeting them where they are, which more often these days is through social media. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard local government representatives say they know they need to get on Twitter or Facebook, but have no understanding of where to begin.
As we build more agile, affordable technology solutions for government, let’s also focus and allocate resources on helping it better communicate to citizens.