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evolve, Featured, Headline, Outreach, Public Awareness and Support »

[ 7 Dec 2012 | One Comment ]
Web link

By: Andrew Wilson, SAMHSA Office of Communications
At SAMHSA, our Web improvement efforts center around a “customer first” approach in everything we do. Much of our recent work focused on understanding how information on the agency’s website should be organized and prioritized.
How are we doing this? A variety of tools and techniques are helping us meet this goal, such as directly soliciting feedback from customers via comments and card sorting exercises, using trending social media stories to identify what issues may be of greatest interest to SAMHSA customers, and examining website …

evolve, Featured, Treatment »

[ 22 Oct 2012 | 13 Comments ]
Location Map

Written By: Andrew Wilson,  Office of Communications, SAMHSA
 Thousands of people visit SAMHSA’s Substance Abuse Treatment Services Locator and the Mental Health Treatment Services Locator every day. These resources provide a vital link between local resources and individuals looking for help. However there is always room for improvement and we want to know your ideas about how to make these tools better.
 To provide your ideas and comments, please visit SAMHSA’s Locator Feedback Forum.  The forum will be open for two weeks, beginning Monday, October 22nd and ending midnight Eastern Time on …

evolve, Featured, Headline, Open Government, Public Awareness and Support »

[ 31 Aug 2012 | No Comment ]
Picture of budding plant to signify the website improvement Project Evolve

Cross-posted from HHS Digital Strategy Blog: 
Written By: Andrew Wilson,  Office of Communications, SAMHSA
Public participation and collaboration are central to making the Digital Strategy work. At the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), they are central to our work to improve the organization and presentation of SAMHSA’s website.
As part of our initial efforts, SAMHSA has been using an online exercise (cardsorting) that allows anyone interested to provide input on how to better organize and categorize the information on the website. In just one week, more than a thousand people provided direct, concrete …

Engagement Services, evolve, Public Awareness and Support »

[ 28 Aug 2012 | One Comment ]
Picture of budding plant to signify the website improvement Project Evolve

Written By: Andrew Wilson, Office of Communications, SAMHSA
Several weeks ago, we asked for help in thinking through how SAMHSA’s website could be better organized. Using an online exercise (called a card sort), participants organized key behavioral health topics into pre-defined categories. The response to our request for participation was tremendous with over 1000 individuals participating over the course of one week.  Participants included:

847 Behavioral Health Professionals
193 Personal/ General Users
70 SAMHSA staff

Drilling Deeper
The next step in this process is to ask for your help with a different exercise – a “reverse …

Data, Outcomes, and Quality, Engagement Services, evolve, Featured, Headline, Open Government, Public Awareness and Support »

[ 13 Aug 2012 | No Comment ]
Picture of budding plant to signify the website improvement Project Evolve

Written By: Andrew Wilson, Office of Communications, SAMHSA
The SAMHSA team supporting Project Evolve has been working hard over the past few months to make improvements to the website. Many of these improvements are still “behind-the-scenes,” but enhancements are underway to both the technical infrastructure underpinning the site and to how the information is organized and presented.
Last fall, the inaugural Project Evolve blog post invited readers to help us evaluate a new way to organize information on the website. Instead of structuring the site around SAMHSA’s organizational layout, we began moving …