Russian government agencies are becoming familiar with social networks

During the first year of the law, which obligated government agencies at various levels to maintain pages on social networks, federal, regional and municipal authorities created and verified 170 thousand public pages – exactly the number of existing government agencies. These statistics were presented on Thursday by Deputy General Director of the Dialogue Regions ANO Andrei Tsepelev during a presentation at the stand of the Expert Institute for Social Research at the Russia exhibition. According to him, the “ecosystem of state publics” is designed to familiarize citizens with the work of government agencies, as well as collect feedback.

Amendments to the federal law “On ensuring access to information on the activities of state bodies and local self-government bodies,” which established the obligation of state and municipal bodies, their subordinate organizations, as well as courts to create and maintain official pages on social networks, came into force last winter. The government has designated two Russian social networks for such pages: VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.

Since then, all 170 thousand structures obligated by law to such a procedure have acquired verified personal pages, Andrei Tsepelev pointed out. Over the course of the year, state public accounts acquired a total of 50 million unique subscribers, publishing an average of 1.4 million posts weekly. The monthly reach of the ecosystem exceeds 1.1 billion views.

The pages, according to Mr. Tsepelev, are run by current employees of institutions: “In most cases, these are very good, caring people who care about the image of their institution.” The expert explained to Kommersant that Dialogue Regions is actively working with department heads, calling for the introduction of motivation measures (including material ones) for such employees, and also organizes their thematic training.

“People don’t come to the Internet to read press releases; they are accustomed to simple, understandable, living language,” noted Andrei Tsepelev during the presentation. “The basic requirement: to be able to translate government content into a simple, living language.” At the same time, employees are encouraged to visualize content and be “caring about their work,” the expert added: “Be an empathic person who cares if people swear in his comments, answer them, and not erase anything.”

The importance of interactivity in such work was also emphasized by Oksana Deminova, administrator of the state public service of one of the schools in the Belgorod region: “There are times when there is not enough time or one gives up. But I always think that someone is waiting for our posts, that the children are interested and want to get on the school’s page.” Her colleague Alexander Kuptsov, who was previously responsible for the Kaluga registry office page, pointed out that, in addition to the administrator’s motivation, management’s interest in the process, clear positioning and relevant topics are important, which allows them to “get on the agenda.” “For us, this is an environment where we can identify incidents and deviations from work standards and respond to these situations as quickly as possible,” First Deputy Governor of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug Alexey Shipilov described the advantages of the new “ecosystem.”

Andrei Tsepelev noted the same function of official pages in a conversation with Kommersant. According to him, in 2020, the pages of authorities and politicians on social networks accounted for 5% of the total number of people’s requests, and now it is already 52%. “People see that the site is specialized, verified, that there is some kind of life there,” the expert explained the mechanism. “Previously, they complained to unofficial noisy publics, but now they have realized that state publics respond better and faster.” The targeted nature of the requests significantly simplified the work of collecting feedback, Mr. Tsepelev summarized.

Grigory Leiba