External Communication

The external communication of a department or sector is a means of interacting with external stakeholders, including citizens, partners and the public. This communication is essential for building and maintaining relationships, achieving the organisation's strategic objectives.

External communication encompasses a wide range of activities and here are some tools that can be used:

• Community Outreach Programs
• Government Websites and Online Portals
• Public Education Campaigns
• Social Media Engagement
• Events and workshops
• Annual Reports and achievement updates
• Public Consultations and Surveys

External communication serves as a means of gathering feedback, market insights, and competitive intelligence, helping the sector to adapt and respond to changing external dynamics.

External communications demonstrate how public administrations engage in diverse external communication activities to inform, engage, and involve citizens and other stakeholders in government digital services design processes.

Recommendations for future actions in terms of communications: 

#1 - RESOURCES FOR CONVERGING EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

Create shared resources to enhance Rwanda’s “brand” on digital transformation progress. Some ideas: 

• Upgrade website templates and make it a real design system for digital public services
• Give the possibility to CDO teams (not only CDOs but also team members) to communicate on their actions
• Pool resources at RISA level and make it available for CDOs: coordinated the communications specialists, this could include video/sound recording material, possibility to create visuals, support to write messaging, …

#2 - PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY ON RWANDA DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY

Create accountability momentums to report publicly on public services digitization and engage stakeholders, for instance:

• Bi-monthly public events (or press conference) to show the results of the mass digitization project: a dashboard could be showcased with key indicators and some project analysts could explain the results and announce future actions
• Demo Days: when a new digital service is launched between tech communities (fictive examples: a developer from the Ministry of Environment can share what he/she has just developed to facilitate meteorologic data exploitation, a data-scientist from a public agency can share a new model for customs selectivity, …)
• Participatory events, such as hackathons, ideations, consultations: including tech students, entrepreneurs, researchers, …: this could happen for any “reason” (new dataset released in open data, launch of a new public policy needing some ideas, solving a “public problem” related to the digital strategy…)
• Introduce the concept of establishing formal feedback mechanisms to gather insights from employees, stakeholders, and end-users throughout the digital transformation journey. Discuss how feedback loops can provide valuable information for refining strategies, addressing challenges, and ensuring that initiatives meet the evolving needs of all stakeholders.