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https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/12/09/the-secret-life-of-email-alerts-why-you-should-add-a-policy/

The secret life of email alerts: why you should add a policy

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The information in this blogpost may now be out of date. See the current GOV.UK content and publishing guidance.

I'm John from DCLG and I work on curating the content which gets included in GOV.UK's daily email alerts for local authorities (which replaced info4local). This is a reminder to say: please don’t forget to add a relevant policy when you publish on editor. As well as keeping interconnected between your policy pages and other content, there is another hidden reason why tagging to policy makes sense.

If your new content is relevant to local authorities, and you want them to be alerted to it in the govdelivery local gov bulletins, the best way to ensure this is to add that policy. Topics are good, they will filter content to the general interest bulletins, but without a policy, 38,000 subscribers who migrated from info4local stand a chance of missing out on your information.

info4local is a service that sends email alerts to thousands of local government employees about stuff central government is publishing of relevance to them. Many local authority staff rely on it to be able to do their jobs. It has been running for 13 years, and was merged in March 2013 with the new GOV.UK email alert service. We're phasing out the info4local name, but we're still curating the 'relevant to local authorities' content for the bulletin on a daily basis.

One last tip - if you left the policy off when you first published, you will need to republish as a major change when you add it – otherwise it just won’t filter through.

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3 comments

  1. Comment by Liz Hitchcock posted on

    Maybe tagging to the 'local government' topic should also send things to info4local.

  2. Comment by John Norman posted on

    It might help, but most of what's slipping through wouldn't be using that topic. Just because it has a local gov interest, it doesn't follow it should be labelled with it, otherwise the local government topic would become too broad.

  3. Comment by Liz Hitchcock posted on

    Hi John - here is a detailed guide which is of interest to local authorities as they have to do it, but it doesn't fit with a policy... https://www.gov.uk/refer-a-deceased-persons-estate-to-the-treasury-solicitor

    So I tagged it to local government, but it's not ABOUT local government...

    What's your advice?