The ask was for $148,000 - two Council members said no - an hour later it was approved. City web site will be better for it

By Pepper Parr

November 20^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

 

Part of the budget process is the filing of Motions by Council members to add or remove an item to the budget.

During an all-day session Councillors Kearns and Bentivegna wanted to remove a $148,000 job for corporate affairs, Web and Digital Marketing.

We will cut to the chase and tell you that job was not cut – it was approved.

Getting to that point was awkward and enlightening.

The Chair, for this Committee of the Whole (CoW)  was Paul Sharman. (At one point they were all chaired by the Mayor – she decided to share the workload – with different Councillors serving as Chair.

Sharman asked Bentivegnia to go first .  Nope that wasn’t going to happen.  Councillor Kearns used a Point of Privilege and asked: “Might it be possible if we could have the items put up on the screen for those in chambers?”

Kearns: My request here is to remove the $148,000 and here’s the reasons why  – the report goes on to say that the purpose of the ask is to provide accuracy and so on and accessibility for content.

This conversation has been taking place for a number of years.  My concern here in reading this whole reasoning for this particular position is, I think we need to take care of the issues that we’re concerned with first..

Bentivegna: The information that gets put into the website. I’m assuming, is approved by someone, some people, a leader in whatever department that is, and it gets put into the web site. From my standpoint, I would like to see some information as to what specifically we need to take out? And then I think the accountability side of it is responsible by each department. You know, if I’m in a particular department and I’m looking for some information and then key it in and it’s not coming out properly, we either remove what is unnecessary or change what needs to be changed. I think once we get into that scope, and then we have a sort of an indication of where we are, I think then we can plan moving forward. Because I think this position is putting the cart for the horse in that this individual is going to basically say what I’m saying, which is: “Okay, everybody out there make sure that the information from your department is correct and it answers the concerns or questions of residents. That’s really my reason for it in terms of funding, I like Councillor Kerns idea of building it from within. But then again, I think we need to take care of the initial issues first and then move forward.

Sharman: I’m looking at the time process, I’m going to be monitoring everything. So questions are one minute and comments at three minutes. We just allowed a maximum of up to three minutes for Councillor Bentivegna introductory comments. I wonder whether do we need to talk about them both? Did you want to make a comment initially about what you’re suggesting Councillor Kerns so that we could do both at the same time, I would prefer to do them both at the same time. So would you comment please.

Kearns: Sure.  “While this is the same line item within the budget, it has a different approach to maximizing and optimizing the funding. Should the the funding be removed from the budget.  It’s equitable across the two proposed amendments. In my research and scan and dialog with with communications department within corporate affairs, what’s become abundantly clear is that this is probably one of the strongest areas within the employment landscape, which is having its base requirements change and shift and be advanced at an accelerated rate, with additional technology investments, as well as new tools that can make communications faster, clearer and more efficient.

“While I have worked with staff to go through the entirety of the department, which does incredible, great work across different sectors, which is the comms piece, it’s the support piece, and it’s, of course, the engagement pieces in this department, what became clear is that perhaps retraining or reallocation or harmonizing across different departments would hopefully lead to, in this year, at least a reallocation of an existing resource to continue to support this role, which is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and digital marketing.

So in that regard I will table it, because I think one of our roles was to identify any types of savings. Look for synergies, look for opportunities. Add in a market scan, add in the changing context and landscape within the world as it relates to each and every one of the departments that we oversee. That’s why this one is drafted a bit differently than simply removing that. There is no doubt that the service is still required. We still need to bolster our SEO, bolster our web collateral. How We Do It is where we can take a second lens and look at it for this year, if we don’t find an area that we can bring those re-allocated resources in to support through either retraining or recalibrating, then we can look at this again next year; that that was my approach for this one, in consultation and with understanding from staff. I know it wasn’t an overly welcome to ask, but sometimes there’s definitely tension when we come and do the budgets. But this is just that healthy tension, and that dialog between staff and Council.

Sharman: Could you clarify  – you used the word table. What did you mean by that?

Kearns: Put it on the table?

Sharman: Oh, you mean your proposal. Just wanted clarity. I don’t know. Sometimes tabling means taking it off. I don’t know, my guess, thank you for that. I’m going to move to questions from Councillor Galbreath,

Galbraith: I just really want to hear from staff on the potentially removing of the advisor, and two on the funding resources from other parts of city operations. Just want to be clearer on what other parts would be funding this, if we keep it in.

At that point Leah and Oanh were asked to introduce themselves.

Leah Bortolotti: I’m the head of corporate affairs. I’m Oanh Kasperskki, Director of Communications and Engagement.

Council was about to learn just how much they didn’t know about the way the city handles its web site.

Note:  The software we use to capture who is speaking is less than perfect.  We don’t always know who is speaking – in this case was it Oanh or Leah?    The two work so well together it was hard at times to tell from the transcript which person was talking.

First – there is no web master – no one person that has oversight over just how the city web site works.

Each department just loads their content – and that’s it.  For those who have wondered why you could never find anything or when you did search and find something there were so many entries – most with no date – you gave up.

So to the question that was asked about potentially removing this position, what you would risk would be compliance with AODA standards, pertinent updates we talk about.

Leah Bortolotti I like this example. We talk about the flood that happened in in July. And the number one thing people used was the phone, right? They called in. But the second thing they did is they checked on the website for updates, right? And people are coming there annually.

6.7 million people come to the city website annually. are coming to our website. There is an increase in reliance on the city’s website to provide pertinent information; updating information is constantly changing. We have Council, we have committee every month. We have things changing from the province, federally as well that’s impacting our information. If we don’t have someone dedicated to do that, we risk not only internally, having a very cumbersome system, also because we do the internet, this would be a position that would work on the internet, but also providing incorrect or inaccurate information to our residents.

We hear this at committee or council, that the information is hard to get, that they can’t understand it. And while I’m relatively new to the city, what I do understand is this has been something that has been requested for several years. Councillor Kerns talked about the systemic issue when it comes to communications engagement, and that really resonated with me, something that I took back. What we are seeing here, if something continues to pop up saying, you know, it’s hard to access information, your website is hard to navigate, I can’t get the relevant information. There’s always a need for continuous improvement at the city, we understand we can communicate better. We can find more creative ways to engage the public.

What we’re we’re seeing here is that we can’t continue to work on the side of our desk. The communications advisors have 25% of the city’s work, and 267 projects right now are active, with 1400 completed this year, and so they are working diligently. There’s always a need to do more, but not funding this position will not change the outcome when it comes to capacity and our ability to be nimble and respond to a changing landscape with constantly changing information.

Councillor Bentivegna: I’ll just add two quick things. I think that if we take a step back for a moment, the idea that we can be a community of this size growing the way that we’re anticipated to grow and not have a single staff role accountable for the website, acknowledging that this is work, as Leah said, that gets done off the side of people’s desks. Not having that person available introduces a level of risk that I don’t think is where we want to go as a community, particularly given that we’ve heard from our community over and over again that the web is an important place for them to go for city information.

Kasperski: The other thing I’ll say is that when we think about the communities communications channels, they’re fairly mature.

They continue to grow incrementally year over year, but generally, they’re fairly mature. As we grow as a community over the next 25 years, and we want to continue to reach more people, different people than we’ve been able to reach before, in ways that are important to them. I think we need to do the digital marketing piece of it, so that we can be proactive, so that we can be strategic and targeted and continue to engage more of our audiences year over year.

I appreciate that Council has very difficult decisions to make around a budget season;  this is not something that we would move forward if we thought the skill set or the capacity existed on the team currently in place. It isn’t. Someone else can do it if we train them or if we invest in them. This is a highly specialized skill – I just want to make that perfectly clear.

Leah Bortolotti: I’ll speak on a macro level, on that.  I can’t tell you where we might have some funding elsewhere to fund this role. I can’t really look at the city in my capacity and say, Okay, take from here to fund that if, if that was what council decided, then that would be your decision. But I think regardless of where that allocation or reallocation of resources came from, what I would say from a head of corporate affairs position is that we would need to find the resources somewhere to fund this position.

Chair: Have you got any other places to cut money?

LeahBortolotti: I have to tell you – I do not. I guess there was a decision the executive management team level to support this. So this is one of the ones that did go forward, that we did support. There were others that didn’t get through that process.

Councilor  Nissan. One question I have is, there’s also a reference to strategic communications, which I think is a great opportunity for us. But how are we going to find someone who’s an SEO and website lead who’s also an expert in strategic communications? How’s that gonna work?

Kasperski: Well, I think we’d like to take a shot at it, so we’ll see what the market will bear. But I think that currently, when we look at the job responsibilities, we do want to prioritize that content management piece, the SEO will come out of that. If  we can get somebody who is strategic in terms of how they see the content map for the city, how it maps against our website. I think that the SEO will come out of that. If we have a really, really strong content, it’s easy to find, it’s accessible, I think that that will generally improve our SEO game.

Leah Bortolotti : That’s a great question when it comes to kind of the different skill set here. So what we’re looking for is someone that’s highly specialized, technical, you’re right strategic as well; that’s kind of like finding a needle in the haystack, but one is coachable. One comes with the technical skill set to make your information more marketable, more accessible, it’s kind of, it comes it builds with that experience and anything that isn’t there inherently through training when it comes to that, that educational background strategy. I mean, we all strategize here.  It’s very hard to coach the technical skills that are involved with web and marketing advisor. I couldn’t do it for sure.

Last question, any savings for us not advertising in the Burlington Post that can be reallocated or have those gone into mail outs and other places ?

Kasperski: The city’s current advertising budget is, or at least the part of it that sits within communications is very, very limited. Some of the amount is allocated to paid advertising, I think we spend probably 80% of it distributing City Talk the two issues that we’ve  committed to doing so there’s very little to begin with, and I don’t think that I can speak to many savings given how, how little we’re working with.

Councillor  Bentavegna: Just two, two quick questions. Can you tell me who authorizes the information in terms of the accuracy and the accessibility that goes on to the website.

Leah Bortolotti:  So I’ll take it from a broad level, and then I’ll have Oanh, who’s the Director of Communications, take it from a micro level.  So from a macro level, let’s say we’re working with the Commissioner of Development and Growth Management for instance.  We’re getting information from that department, we’re working with the subject matter expert in that division or that department to confirm what is being  drafted for communications is accurate.

Once that goes to the relevant communications advisors, because all the communications advisors have their own files for four pillars (name them)  that would then go online. The problem, or the gap that exists right now is that once that information goes online, changes might not always be communicated, and changes might not also be understood. Like, let’s say the province changes something, and we don’t catch wind of it until two or three weeks later, that information is already out of date. What I would say is to have the position we want to fill be proactive and the monitoring of the information on that website and proactively reaching out to that division department to say, is this information still accurate? We are doing an audit of x, and this is why we need to have you double check it to verify if it’s true and if it’s not, then that person would then change the content to make sure that it is up to date.

Leah Bortolotti:  I think, in an ideal world where there’s capacity to also do the end-to-end would be great. They are creating the content, they’re verifying it through the relevant departments, and then they’re also uploading that information. Absolutely, that would be perfect.

Mayor Meed Ward: The problem is, right now, there’s only one person whose role does not include updating or working on the website – is that right?

Leah Bortolotti: In an ideal world where everyone was trained on updating that website and ensuring that their contents are current, absolutely but the reality is that the advisors are also working on projects across the city and then for one councilor as well. Everyone has a dedicated Councillor that they work for as well for communication support. Could we be more proactive? What I’m saying is, there’s a capacity issue  just plain and simple, and we’re not always on the back end, scanning the website and all of its variety of pages to ensure that the content is relevant, because we’re working on projects of the day.

My second question is a quick one. You mentioned 6.7 million users. That’s a lot of users. Do we track, if I went on to the website and didn’t find what I wanted to when I first went on and went on again immediately after? Do we track duplicates or triplicates in terms of the 6.7 million, does the system tell us that I went in twice or three times for the same thing?

Leah Bortolotti: That’s a great question. Councilor through the chair. So the data that we’re tracking is unique users through IP addresses. So if you’re going through again on the same device, then it would tell us that it’s the same user. We’re also getting the number of sessions and page views against individual users. So we can tell if we’ve got particular IP addresses that are coming back over and over again, you’re spending a very small amount of time on a single landing page, and then we call it bouncing. They leave immediately after.

We can deduce from that either they found what they needed really, really quickly, or they didn’t at all. Right, we can look at some of the user journeys and get a better sense of it through some of the data, but we do have that available to us. What we’re seeing is, for the most part, people use the website to access services. So they are coming in through a Google search, which is why the SEO is so important to us. They are finding a particular set of pages related to that service that they’re interested in. They’re getting the information that they need, and then they are leaving.

That’s the general experience that we’re seeing so far, and that’s why the content that exists on those sub pages becomes really, really important. Is it up to date? Is it relevant? Is it delivered in a way that provides people with what they need in an accessible manner? That’s what this role is built for.

In 2022 in our budget, we provided $150,000 to take the website from 2015 standards, the last time it was either invented or updated, to 2022 standards. The regulatory requirement for the AODA compliance from that time as well.

A Council member asked: Are you saying that we haven’t either templated any uploads to be AODA compliant, or we just haven’t had anyone go back and check AODA compliance?

I’ll go round about a little bit on this one. Best practice in the field is typically to update it every two to three years. If you look at your iPhones, if you look at your tablets and your computers, there’s a shelf life to some of this technology, and so AODA compliance is one of the things that we’re looking for.

AODA compliance also requires us to meet different standards that are progressively higher over time. So we have a different set of standards to meet today than we would have had in 2022 to ensure accessibility of our materials in our site.

Sorry, I thought that the AODA compliance was by 2025 –  are you saying it changed again? So it would be a different level of AODA compliance. Starting in 2025 would be the highest level. Okay, I just think that there’s a difference here between AODA compliance and all the other things that you might be communicating need to go in around website cleanup and broken links which still exist and things like that.

Yeah, it’s fundamentally a website management role with digital marketing attached. And so all of the things that you would look at in terms of website management and administration, are the things that we would be looking for this role to take on.

Bentivegna:  A quick question for you. So given the increasing sophistication of everything, internet, everything, it environmental factors, and the loss of the Burlington Post, does that make the task that you’re you’re proposing here more critical?

Leah Bortolotti: through the chair? I would say absolutely. But it’s more so that we’re seeing now more than ever, people are they’re not passively consuming, they’re actively consuming, and so they’re looking for that information. And so we need to make sure I had this correct. We host over 500 static pages, 650 dynamic pages, and 1400 documents. That’s constantly changing. We also have a changing population, so some of this information isn’t easy to consume for them.

When it comes to providing relevant information, absolutely, we need to make sure that the integrity is there as a city that we’re giving them the most up-to-date information.

We talk about artificial intelligence all the time. It’s very exciting. I get excited about it in regards to how it can support our own CoBy  When residents reached out to COBY it’s pulling from our website. So you still need a human to make sure that that information is relevant and up to date. COBY is not going to say, or AI, is not going to say at its current state for our city website. Oh, on page X, down the rabbit hole, this is out of date.

We need a human being to do that and then train the AI so in very critical times when people are looking for relevant information – flood grant relief programs that the city offers, COBY was using the information that a human made and put on the website to make sure that it was sharing the right information with residents.

Chair Sharman: I’m going to treat this item as already moved by both the council members. I don’t think we need to move it again, but I’m going to ask for comments.

Councilor Stolte:  My comments will be brief. It had not occurred to me to look to remove this item, and I’m certainly been convinced with all the conversation that we’ve had that engagement and communication is critical. I totally agree that we have residents who are seeking out that information actively, which is great, and if the information is not updated and relevant, it results in added workload on Counsellors offices, Counsellors’ assistance Service Burlington, as people struggle to get the information they need.  If filling this position allows people to get the updated and current, relevant information they need, then I think it’s well worth it.

Councillor Bentivegna:  When we did the 2022 update it included the Burlington Transit website and a couple of other websites too Will this include Get Involved ?

Kasperski: Through the chair, absolutely. This osition specifically would be for website management, so anything that we have would be this specific role.

Bentivegna: And you brought up AI – CoBy is great, he or she, whoever that person is, I actually test the system. I ask questions, as a resident may ask questions, and it says, please go to Service Burlington or whatever. So I guess my comment is, how can we utilize such a great resource which a lot of our public does not know he exists, or she exists, or it exists, and for us to look at staff wise. How do we put in those questions that are commonly asked because we already know them and fix it. That’s where I want to get to before we allocate more funds to make things even better. I think we need to fix what we have and then move forward maybe two times, rather than just moving forward and having to go back and talk to CoBy.

Mayor Meed Ward: Chair through you. I do see this as a critical investment in community engagement, especially when the Burlington Post and other outlets are struggling to provide the information to the community. We know there’s been an increased cost. The Hamilton Spectator, where we now have to advertise certain things we used to put in the Post, is far more expensive than the Post. I know that’s taken a hit with your budget, and when 6.7 million residents visit, some probably every day, go to the website, you know, obviously that’s  6.7 million attempts to find information. It needs to be accurate, it needs to be accessible, and it needs to be there. So I see this as an investment in our community and community engagement, giving them transparent, accountable information.

Two votes were required. Bentivegna lost on his Motion and Kearns lost on her Motion – and the ask for the $148,000 stayed in the budget.  City Council now knows a lot more about just how bad the city website is.  What was really evident was that neither Kasperski and Bortolotti knew very much about how a newsroom handles the flow of information from a keyboard to the press room or the internet. That is not a knock on either woman – they certainly knew what they were up against with the website that is currently in place. They certainly know now what they are looking for and they know this is not going to be an easy placement.

The communications people all have certificates in public relations – not a newspaper person in the department.

At the provincial level the Communications Director for every department is a former senior newspaper person – people who understand media, have decades of experience, and reliable sources.

The really good news is that Kasperki and Bortolotti have managed to get past the first ask – they will need additional people next budget.  If they hire the right person and manage the job that gets done the public will be a lot better off when it comes to getting information.