Benchmarking and Recommendations: A real world perspective

My project is all about improving the WAEC's website & social media and in order to do that, the topics of benchmarking and recommendations are heavily involved.

Firstly, the WAEC aims to make their website more user-friendly and easier to navigate. My task was to go through the website, the content and how it was all organised.

As a student who has had to visit the WAEC website to find information for assignments, I had an understanding of what information could be made more accessible and how information may be able to be presented differently. Regardless, I thoroughly analysed the website's presentation and content in order to provide recommendations for how this could be presented differently.

I have recently been told that my recommendations have been taken on board and that a couple will be featured on the new website. One of these recommendations is the creation of a legal page that will include all relevant legislative documents as well as information on election fines (that are issued for not voting). I was very surprised and ecstatic to hear this news.

Improving the social media channels however, has proved to be a more difficult task. It is important to mention that the WAEC has regulations on what can & can't be posted to social media to ensure political neutrality. In order to make recommendations for the WAEC's channels, I first had to look at what the other electoral commissions in Australia were posting to their channels.

Benchmarking has always been emphasised in our PR units and I've never really given it much thought until now. By having a look at the other electoral commissions, I found a great amount of similarities and differences.

Some of the similarities include but are not limited to:

• Social media guidelines regarding political neutrality
• Promotion of election information and content (as various states are in the process of conducting state & local government elections)
• The specific social media sites used (every commission has an official Facebook page and a majority also use Twitter and Youtube)

The major differences between commissions is how the information is presented. For example the Victorian Electoral Commission uses animated videos to provide electoral information while the NSW Electoral Commission uses power-point lecture styled videos to present similar information. 

There were also differences in the consistency of usage. For example, the Tasmanian Electoral Commission has not updated their Facebook since July, while the WAEC tends to update their Facebook weekly. 

I have found the benchmarking process very eye-opening and helpful for the creation of recommendations for social media content and presentation. My next project involves the creation of a content schedule as well as the creation of content for fixed events in the election timeline (role close, early voting, etc.) and thus the findings from my benchmarking & recommendations will very much come in handy.

Only 10 more days left of my internship and the pressure is on to make the most of it.

Until next time,

Isabella