Built for Purpose Communication Tools for Better Relationships
Paper correspondence via post, phone calls, and emails are all tools that people designed to improve communication. Technology changes influence how we communicate with each other. As a society, we are continuously innovate the ways we interact and discovering new processes to improve our day-to-day lives.
When researching and doing design thinking for Accreditron, our team was confronted with a new challenge: how can an organisation communicate with multiple government agencies and provide up-to-date, adaptive information and documents to the soloed units of government. Their relationships are many-to-many; many people in an organisation to many people in many different agencies, crown entities, district health boards, and councils.
Organisations and government agencies are concerned about security and risks. Too many useful tools that are not specifically designed to be used with government won’t get past government firewalls. Even commonly used tools in the private sector like Google Drive or Dropbox don’t make the cut for many government agencies. Gov-tech companies in New Zealand have to focus their time going through long and rigorous government processes — basically, they need to be built for purpose and designed for government.
With email communication, the first thing that comes to mind is long email threads, attachment size restrictions, and endless CC lists. People move roles inside agencies and organisations, and their email accounts need to be managed and redirected properly. Imagine the feeling of sending an email into the black void, your contact person has left their role, but their email account was not redirected or shut down properly. Those lost correspondences could cause an organisation to lose funding and not succeed in their mission.
When you have to communicate with a new person, even if their email account has been properly managed, they likely do not understand your history between your organisation and theirs. Leaving you repeating yourself to get them up to date, resulting in a bad experience. The benefit of platform-based communication is that a new contact can read through your history of your professional relationship. They can begin their conversation with you from a place of knowledge — saving time on both sides and establishing trust.
Make sure your organisation is using the right tool for the job. Easy communication means more transparency and pleasant interactions to build stronger relationships.
Modern organisation communication strategies should utilise built for purpose tools. Platforms have clearly defined stakeholders, and thus the communication can be designed for the stakeholders specific use case. This is a great way to facilitate a pleasant user experience by making processes and information clear and by threading discussions into groups or categories for better organisation.
At Accreditron, we are testing innovative ways Social Service Providers can manage their information and communicate easily with government agencies. Our first step is to provide inline communication to users of Accreditron to reduce lost emails and store important communication in the right place to be visible by all relavent parties.
Find out more at Accreditron
