Cass has been quietly, but effectively, behind a lot of really effective digital engagement activity in government, both in her current role in the Digital team at the Department for Energy & Climate Change, and before that, as Web Manager at UK Trade & Investment.
At UKTI – an organisation which takes its digital very seriously – she was instrumental in building up probably the best UK government example of engagement via LinkedIn, creating a vibrant community over 5,000 strong of exporters, potential exporters, advisors and government folk, which buzzes with ideas and enthusiasm.
I’m pretty sure she had a big hand in UKTI’s excellent but low-profile group blog, which showcases some great stories about international trade and markets, and even better, integrates them with the practical support UKTI has been offering for years. For quite a while, the blog lived quietly on the cheap hosted service wordpress.com, which was probably a first for a major corporate presence like that.
And when my venue for Meet The Communities fell through late in the day, Cass was one of the first to put her hand up (on Twitter) to help host the event at DECC, where she and colleagues David, Ian and Rachel there took care of all the logistics and produced some great video footage, even sending me a copy of the hashtagged tweets when I was too slow to extract them from Twitter myself.
Three cheers for Cass.
Comments
Thank you Steph! This is a lovely article. Such is the pace of govt digital comms, there is little time for reflection so this is a really nice way to remember some of the work of which I’m most proud.
I hope you don’t mind me taking the opportunity to namecheck 2 of my former colleagues who were as instrumental to the UKTI digital push – Diane Brodie and Kate Sbuttoni – my digital heroines!
Hip hip hooray x 3 🙂
Nice to see Cass and UKTI get some recognition. In discussions about central government digital engagement, it’s generally the likes of the DFID or Foriegn Office blogs that get mentioned, but as far as I’m concerned UKTI have been doing some of the most interesting things with social media in government. They’ve just not been as shouty about it as some!
Cass had a strategy in place at UKTI very early on – a strategy that has helped inform the work I’ve been doing with the Scottish Centre for Regeneration and also the Scottish Government’s approach to digital engagement more generally.
But, heh, UKTI has a history of being at the forefront of digital developments. They were doing devolved content management before anyone else had tried it and had a site which was intranet, extranet and public website.
They’re a jolly nice bunch of people to boot!
[Disclaimer: I worked for UKTI for 2 years :-)]