The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs has used social media to engage constituents, execute programming, and advocate change since 2012. We have identified six objectives to drive the assessment of these pilot efforts: access, participation, relevance, responsiveness, transparency, and visibility. DCA Social Report shows analyses relative to our objectives and offers recommendations for future social engagements.

Read our summary of findings for a quick overview. For a detailed context of the report, read the extended introduction.

A glimpse of the purpose, methodology, and utility of this report:

• We ask: What are our objectives for using social media as a municipal arts agency? How do we adapt industry and federal-level assessment tools and methods to further our goals? What and how do we measure our achieved results? Read about the purpose of this report.

• Responding to the limitations of social media analytics made to meet public needs, we designed a mixed methodology including qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches. We adapted DigitalGov social media metrics and analytic tools native to Facebook and third-party aggregator software such as Sumall, Tagboard, and Storify. Read more about our methods.

• This report is a part of an agile, practice-driven approach to refine social media implementation at DCA. Through a multi-step plan that iterates engagement approaches based on actual assessment results, we build up a social media practice and an assessment model that resonate with the specific needs of DCA and the purposes of city government. This report is beta and we welcome your feedback. Read more about this iterative model.

• This report is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. Sharing the report’s outcomes and related recommendations, we intend to contribute to the collective understanding of social media in city government. Read more about the utility of this report.

 

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This summary indicates successes related to areas of relevance, transparency, access, and participation. An area that requires urgent attention is responsiveness; an area that calls for strategic attention is access, specifically related to language. The purpose of analysis in this report is exploratory, not conclusive. The figures generated in analysis will provide a reference to create benchmarks suitable for DCA and to refine metrics for future assessments.

• Relevance: We build DCA’s relevance by generating content regularly and working with media partners. Our participation at the #CityLab2014 Twitter Party produced content that reached over 1 million people. We also found a strong correlation between the quantity of posts produced, the quantity of responses from the public, and the resulting reach of the original content. We recommend regular content creation and establishing and maintaining relationships with key influencers.

• Transparency: We use social media to explain the steps and purpose of city process to build citizens’ trust and transparency. Live tweeting our grants workshop enabled us to explain our grants process to more than 12,000 people. We recommend working with DCA staff to coordinate live tweeting at informational events to bridge the gap between digital and analog information.

• Access: We increase access to arts by distributing DCA’s information to our constituents across 23 identified geographical areas and 19 language groups. A count of our Facebook users’ self-identified language indicates a need for the department to develop content in Spanish. We can achieve a better understanding of our constituents’ language preferences through contextualizing location data with census information and coordinating with DCA staff who offers frontline services, especially those in the field offices.

• Participation: We use hashtags to encourage participatory experiences of DCA’s programming . The #LAIslamArts hashtag campaign generated more than 400 participant posts and amplified participation on and offline. We recommend the continual use of hashtags to engage across platforms and to create a responsive feedback loop so that programming staff and directors can evaluate programming participation and plan for future programming based on actual participation results.

• Responsiveness: We leverage social media to maintain an efficient channel of communication for citizen feedback and keeping pulse on current civic and arts conversations. Our responsivness in 4 months, however, is under performing with a 45% non-response rate. More staff time and attention should be devoted to close monitoring of and thoughtful responses to the notification feed.

• Visibilty: We heighten the visibility of LA arts and culture to a global audience on social media. The LA Islam Arts Initiative Facebook page has distributed information that touches 42 countries and 233 cities across the world. Our participation on Twitter parties raised the awareness of arts and creative placemaking to more than 1 million users. When resources allow, we recommend that DCA not only participates in Twitter parties hosted by members of DCA’s digital community, but also hosts digital social events to highlight the department’s public mission and arts advocacy.

 

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Wendy F Hsu (@wendyfhsu, wendy.hsu@lacity.org), Principle Investigator, Assessment Designer, and Co-Author.
ACLS Public Fellow, working with DCA to rethink and design information and data paradigms, augmenting digital literacy, relevance, and public engagement.

Jack Moreau (@JackfromNELA), Data Analyst and Co-author.
Digital Media Intern, working with DCA to visualize data and information to analyze new and digital communications.

To cite this report, refer to the following information:

Hsu, Wendy and Jack Moreau. (2015). DCA Social Report. Retrieved from: http://dcaredesign.org/socialreport