Postbureaucrat

Personal blogging by Steph Gray, former digital agency founder and erstwhile bureaucrat

Featured posts

Fêting failure

September 12, 2013

I’ve always suspected there’s a damn sight less success around than people claim, and a damn sight more dumb luck and hidden failure brushed under the carpet. There’s a lovely piece by John Coventry on failure over on Wonkcomms today that really struck a chord with me: I’ve always thought that being on the frontline of communicating the work…

Keeping up with our clients

September 12, 2013

Our clients do some jolly interesting things online. Of course, I would say that, but they really do: everything from podcasting about alternatives to Trident to fighting dodgy landlords, arguing for involving the public in deciding how to deal with Syria to arguing the case for reorganising A&E departments. Like a lot of digital agencies,…

What public consultation can look like

September 10, 2013

I’ve been a bit grumpy lately that use of digital tools to engage the public creatively around policy consultations has stalled. Sure, there’s some good tweeting, and some creative ministerial webchats, but not much that tackles the showstopping barriers of impenetrable language, lengthy response forms and boring or loaded questions. What BIS has done with…

All the news that’s fit to print

August 19, 2013

It’s silly season, so here’s my contribution. A few months ago, my mouse hand slipped and I found myself the owner of one of Berg’s Little Printers, a small thermal printer which prints on receipt paper and connects to the internet. It delivers ‘publications’ like the weather forecast, a crossword puzzle, or a quote of…

Good corporate tweeting

July 18, 2013

Lots of people have views on the ‘right’ way to use Twitter as an organisation. I’m pretty liberal about it: I think it’s fine to use it to pump out press releases from a corporate account if that’s the expectation you set, or to have a dormant, verified account there ready for a crisis, or…

Offboarding

July 2, 2013

I’m learning a lot about salesmanship these days. Downstairs at Helpful Towers, where the people who manage our serviced office work, there are posters on the wall celebrating great customer service and setting out the company’s model for managing the customer relationship from first contact, right through to careful ‘off-boarding’, when the client moves out.…

Blogging about blogging

June 26, 2013

Last week, Team Helpful took a day off to focus on kick starting the revamp of our website. The results will hopefully appear soon, but one thing that won’t be appearing on the new site is a blog. Or at least, not in the conventional sense. As a civil servant working in digital six years…