Village communications team targets priorities

The Village of Port Jefferson Board of Trustees and staff members convened for a work session on Friday, Oct. 28, tackling the various features of the local government’s communications network.

Mayor Margot Garant called the meeting as part of an ongoing effort within her administration to enhance communications between the various entities interfacing with the village government. She set the meeting’s objective. “I want us to create some priorities as a team and then find out where we’re going from here,” she said. “I want the outcomes of this meeting to be defining our priorities for the next six months.”

Centralizing the message

For Garant, effective communication starts with communicating with the general public but goes further than that end alone. She maintained the village could carry out exchanges more efficiently by modifying the existing communications framework in all its facets.

“Communication goes beyond just communicating to the residents and the public,” Garant said. “It goes to communicating internally to staff and everything else.”

Garant said she sees regular communications meetings as essential. Through these dialogues, the team can establish a basis for deciding upon important stories, producing the content and then broadcasting its message.

Deputy Mayor Kathianne Snaden identified some of her priorities. While she said the village has a highly competent staff, greater coordination between these individual units could better advance a common end.

“We have fantastic pieces and parts,” she said, yet “each one is in a silo, somewhat. There’s obviously crossover, but I think … it’s just getting them to work efficiently and overlap.”

Trustee Lauren Sheprow, the village’s communications commissioner, referred to this overlapping method as “the cascading effect — create once, publish everywhere.”

The mayor offered her agreement: “We’ve been completely disconnected, and no one knows who’s driving the bus and where the bus is going.”

Garant also discussed the need for a central chain of command, with the communications team controlling how messages get out. She stressed the need for all parties to go through this decision-making body.

“It’s directing traffic,” the mayor said. “And it’s also creating a very clear line on who they should be talking to and who is giving them the direction.”

Sheprow pitched the potential value of implementing a “global event calendar” and a “content management calendar” within the village government, enabling better organization and tracking of upcoming deadlines.

Garant also identified the need to promptly formulate a plan for circulating emergency information.

“We have the winter season coming up, and that’s usually when we have emergency-type situations,” she said. “You’re going to have a different team at the table when it comes to that. You’re going to have the fire marshal, [code enforcement] chief [Fred] Leute, the ambulance company … you have different threads, different protocols, different everything.”

A website overhaul

In the coming months, a focal point for this administration will be modernizing the village’s website. Garant explained some of the difficulties she experienced using the existing web format.

The current website has several inefficiencies, some of which were identified during the meeting. The future overhaul of the website will emphasize user-friendliness.

“The most important tool we have is our website, and right now I can’t find things on it,” Garant said. “I think that [a revamped website] will have a tremendous impact on how we operate.”

Regarding the website, Kevin Wood, the village’s director of economic development, highlighted some areas for revision. He indicated the existing platform provides too many search results, which clutter the page and overwhelm the user.

“The problems with the website are plentiful,” he said. “One of the things that drives everybody insane is that if you search for just about any topic, you’ll get [results from] 2011, 2012,” adding, “we have to change that.”

Getting the message across

Another discussion point was the matter of producing press releases. Garant argued that generating content can help spotlight prominent stories within the community.

While producing more frequent press releases can help the village get its message out, Wood added that press releases are not limited to a written format. “We should be doing 1-minute video press releases,” he said.

The director of economic development added that compiling information for press releases requires coordination between the various entities involved in a story. For example, a press release spotlighting a particular aspect of village history may require commentary from local historians, public officials and other stakeholders.

“It’s not as simple as taking an email and writing a press release,” he said. “The idea of a press release has to be collaborative.”

As the meeting ended, Garant expressed satisfaction with how much the communications team had accomplished to date. While the village continues to implement its vision for more effective internal and external communication, she expressed confidence in the group assembled. Garant said the committee is headed up by Wood and Charmaine Famularo, a staff member, with trustees Snaden and Sheprow.

“I feel confident that we have the right team, and I think it’s going to be good,” the mayor concluded.