GUC’s Public Information Office received two 2019 Excellence in Public Power Communications awards from the American Public Power Association (APPA).  The awards were in the Video and Digital (web/social media) categories.

Awards were given to those who showed ingenuity and creativity in telling their stories through outstanding copy, design, graphics, social media engagement, and video editing. This is the fourth time GUC has won an award for website and/or social media efforts, and the second award for video.

“I am proud of our Public Information team for receiving this recognition,” said Public Information Officer Steve Hawley. “We work hard to clearly and creatively communicate with our customers and community, and this recognition is a testament to that hard work paying off.”

The American Public Power Association is the voice of not-for-profit, community-owned utilities that power 2,000 towns and cities nationwide. They represent public power before the federal government to protect the interests of the more than 49 million people that public power utilities serve, and the 93,000 people they employ. The association advocates and advises on electricity policy, technology, trends, training, and operations.

Video Award

The Public Information Office created a video campaign emphasizing the value of GUC. Each video in the campaign (a total of eight) focused on one of our utilities (electric, water, wastewater, and natural gas), as well as customer service. We featured some of our employees’ children in the videos to explain how we help our customers and the community. Each video opens with one or two children stating what they think their parent does in their career at GUC. Then the video elaborates on the message, describing how our service is of value to our customers and community.

Due to the limit that APPA placed on how long the video composite could be, we entered seven of the eight videos in the campaign, and the link to view those is:

https://vimeo.com/349527419/5ef9cd0f4c

Digital Award for Website Redesign

In December 2018, Public Information launched GUC’s redesigned website (guc.com), after working for months with a committee of staff from all our service areas (electric, natural gas, water, and wastewater), as well as customer relations, human resources, and finance.

With a goal of making the site as customer-focused as possible, the committee began by studying analytics of the previous site. Using that, they designed an engaging new website with multiple pathways to give our customers the information and services they wanted and used the most.

Customers and staff alike have given positive feedback about the site’s new online chat feature where employees handle questions from customers quickly, easily, and efficiently. To date, over 5,400 chats have taken place! Also new are feeds from our social media accounts, featured on the splash page to remind customers of additional ways for them to stay up-to-date with us.

The committee also made sure that the new site works equally well on desktop computers and mobile devices, with full responsiveness.  It also has several features to make it ADA compliant, including the ability for screen readers to describe images, the ability to tab through pages instead of using a mouse, and even the color palette was cross-checked to assure the contrast is ADA compliant.

Our website sees a lot of action. A typical month includes over 92,000 page views and more than 34,000 unique visitors. We rely on our website as one of the primary ways we meet our customers’ needs.

A big thank you goes to the following website redesign committee members for their hard work: LouAnne Baker (Water Resources), Kathy Howard (Business Development), Lisa Johnson (Gas), Natalie O’Neal (Electric), Lena Previll (Human Resources), Jonathan Sergeant (Energy Services), Colleen Sicley (Customer Relations), Scott Mullis (Customer Relations), Amy Wade (General Manager’s Office), and Linda Clark (Public Information).