Most unusual email sign up process of the week
Go to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
Click on “Email updates” on the right.
You get stepped through an email sign-up process which is generally pretty good, even if the list of options for different sources of news from DECC is rather long – and it is a bit surprising to be offered email updates about what DECC is doing on Twitter. But perhaps they regularly do news releases with an analysis of what’s up on Twitter and how their use of it is going? Time and my inbox will tell.
At the next stage it gets interesting. You are then offered the chance to sign up also to email services from other parts of Government. An interesting – and potentially powerful – example of cross-marketing.
Except… one of the government bodies offered up for email updates is the US’s Environmental Protection Agency. Have you ever seen a government offering email sign ups for another government in this way? It’s not wholly illogical, but certainly unusual.
As an American, doesn’t that bother you just a little bit? Have you ever tried to contact the EPA? Or tried to get an answer from the IRS? How about Social Security Disability? Or just tracking a box the USPS delivered to a black hole?
But I’ll wager you’d like to see the federal bureaucracy handle your doctor visits, right?
Kyle – er…, I’m not an American. Hence the post talking about a British Government Department (Department of Energy and Climate Change) and the domain name ending in .uk 🙂
That said, although it would be rather weird for the US government to handle my doctor visits, having the UK government do so here seems to work rather better than the health care system in the US.