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HHS Center for New Media

Podcast: Gathering public input using ideation

You’re listening to The HHS Center for New Media podcast, where new and innovative media projects are introduced, shared, and discussed.

“You know…across government right now, there is people looking at ideation…these kinds of tools both for external engagement with the public and with stakeholders.”

Andrew Wilson is a Web and New Media specialist at The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, SAMHSA. 

“Our Administrator, Pam Hyde, had decided that for our Strategic Initiative Paper, she actually wanted to go and gauge the public around this document.”

The goal of that document is to develop efforts to enhance the mission of SAMHSA. Andrew took the lead on setting up User Voice as an ideation tool that would allow users to submit, discuss and vote on ideas.

We had the entire document where people could comment on the entire strategic initiative paper, but also each individual section. So for us, this main project that we ran…we actually had 9 simultaneous forums running at the same time.”

Over the course of eight weeks, the public submitted 700 ideas, 1,700 comments, and over 23,000 votes. 

“And then that closed about a month ago. And during that interim period when it’s closed, we’ve been working on reviewing those comments, and then actually taking those comments and working our response and how our agency’s gonna handle those issues back into the final draft of the Strategic Initiative document.”

SAMHSA is keeping the public in the loop on their blog, blog.samhsa.gov, explaining the process for using public feedback to make changes.

“So we’re going out there and bringing this full circle. We’ve asked people for public comment and now we’re talking about, on our blog, how we’re gonna be responding to the issues.”

That filtering of feedback has proven to be the most difficult part of the process for Andrew and SAMHSA’s staff.

“One of the main challenges is, when you get such an incredible amount of feedback such as we did, how can you find better ways to actually improve the process so it’s not as burdensome on staff in terms of filtering and being able to categorize the feedback that you get.”

Part of the answer to that question is in creating targeted questions for the public.

“Make sure that the questions you’re asking are sufficiently narrow that people can give very concrete responses. If you leave the question or the issue too abstract, the problem is that the information you’re going to get back is also gonna be very abstract, and it’s going to be much more difficult to categorize it and come up with a very concrete solution.”

SAMHSA plans to incorporate ideas and comments, and release the final Strategic Initiative Paper sometime this December. In the future, SAMHSA hopes to use feedback tools such as User Voice not just to engage with the public, but also to improve their operations internally.

“It’s not gonna replace all internal communications. We see it as a really potentially valuable tool in learning how we can do better here at SAMHSA and also how we can be more efficient in what we do.”

You’ve been listening to the HHS Center for New Media podcast, where new and innovative media projects are introduced, shared, and discussed. If you have a project, media tool, or idea that you want to share with other HHS employees, please contact newmedia@hhs.gov.

Thanks for listening. I’m Nicholas Garlow.