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This is part two of a series detailing the findings of a team of researchers from 18F and USAGov who studied broad trends in people’s perceptions of and interactions with the government. 

Two weeks ago, we discussed the research and findings that ultimately led to the decision to change our name. Today, we’ll talk about how we chose USAGov.

It was clear that our previous name, the Federal Citizen Information Center (FCIC), had a few issues.

In our last post, we introduced the Federal Front Door project and briefly described a six-week discovery phase, in which we set out to better understand how the general public feels about and interacts with the federal government, so that we can design and build products that improve people’s experience across government agencies.

They ranked among our top three most popular emails in 2015.

At USAGov, we know that email is often our #1 driver of traffic to our content, and nine out of 10 times it’s our go-to outreach tool for disseminating timely information. But doing email sends consistently and effectively isn’t always clear cut, especially when you have a combined 1.3 million subscribers.

We send email blasts to our subscriber lists about all sorts of content based on what they signed up to get. Topics range from immigration to travel, health, and jobs.

The first phase of our partnership with Facebook included Facebook "megaphones" being rolled out in a handful of states with rapidly approaching voter registration deadlines. Facebook's megaphone is a featured box that is displayed at the top of all user's News Feeds. (You may recall seeing these after certain disasters giving users the option to quickly donate to Red Cross or other organizations).

We piloted the voter registration megaphone in South Carolina on January 15.