1. Use of Social Media for the Montgomery County, Office of Community Use of Public Facilities (CUPF)
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Qianye Yang, and I am a second-year public policy student. My project is “Use of Social Media for the MoCo, Office of Community Use of Public Facilities”. And the Office is also known as CUPF. Even before I start, I would like to say thank you to people who have helped me a lot. Ginny Gong, Liz Habermann, Ron Maxson from the Rockville Office, and Eric Rasch from Silver Spring Civic Building.
Qianye Yang
May 16th 2017

2. Introduction CUPF’s role Need for social media Research questions
First, the introduction part, and four topics will be covered.
CUPF’s role
Need for social media
Research questions
Methodology

3. The Role of CUPF
CUPF issues use permits for public access to community facilities at scheduled times after business hours, and at affordable rates.
MoCo Public Schools
Grass Fields
Silver Spring Civic Building
CUPF implements policies set by the Interagency Coordinating Board (ICB), which is made up of the very prominent members of the County.
County Executive
Board of Education
County Council
CUPF issues use permit for the community to use public facilities, such as public schools, grass fields, and the Silver Spring Civic Building. The community can use them after the business hours at affordable rates.
CUPF implements policies set by ICB, the Interagency Coordinating Board. And the Board is made up of the very prominent members of the County. Some are appointed by the County Executive, and some are designated by the Board of Education, and the County Council. When we think about CUPF’S work, ICB should be a key factor.

4. Need for Social Media Reach out to community
Deliver information
Timely and frequently
To wider users
Reach out to community
Dispel misconceptions
Respond to customers’ inquiries efficiently
In the process of working, CUPF finds it necessary to use social media. First, it wants to deliver information timely and frequently to wider users. Now, it has a monthly newsletter, and alerts to the subscribers. But compared to social media, the current two tools cannot meet CUPF’s need.
Second, CUPF wants to reach out to community to dispel misconceptions. Now, many customers think it easy to use county facilities, like booking a seat on an airplane. However, to get things done, CUPF needs to think and do more, such as considering the conditions of a school.
Third, social media also makes it possible for CUPF to.

5. Research Questions What social media platforms shall we use?
How many employees should be designated towards social media?
How much time is needed per day?
How to improve social media performance? (strategies or tactics)
How to respond to inquiries?
But how to do use social media? Here, we have some questions to answer? Such as:
And to answer these questions, we did the social media project. It is like a benchmarking study. By looking at how similar jurisdictions use social media, we hope we can learn something.

6. Methodology Interviews
Fulton County, GA
DC Public Schools, Montgomery County Public Schools, Baltimore County Public Schools
Montgomery College
MoCo, Office of Consumer Protection, Department of Recreation
Social media pages (Facebook and Twitter) of the jurisdictions interviewed
Social media policies
I need to mention that Fulton County is far from here, but it is included because of the similarity in the size and population.

7. Findings Social media platforms to use Staff designation options
Time needed
Performance Improvement
inquiries or comments responding

8. Social Media Platforms to Use
Social media platforms used by the jurisdictions interviewed
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram & Flickr & Pinterest (photos, pictures, and flyers)
Blog (news)
YouTube (videos)
As you can see, jurisdictions use all kinds of social media platforms. Facebook and Twitter are the most common ones. YouTube, possibly in the future, we would like to make some videos in foreign languages for our customers. So, YouTube would make things better.

9. Staff Designation Options
Responsibility
Access to the accounts 1
Social media person
To post, monitor, and respond
Yes
Assistant
To help when the social media person cannot do the job timely 2
To draft, and monitor No
The current IT staff
To check, post, and respond or transfer 3
To provide topics and information, monitor, and respond
Contractor
To post
The second option is similar to what we do with the newletter.

10. Time Needed Three to four hours per day
DCPS: large amounts of issues to deal with
Fulton County: six social media platforms
One to two hours per day is the most common situation

11. Performance Improvement
Make more people know the Office’s social media pages:
Add linkages to the pages
On the Office’s website
In employee’s signature
Keep posting contents frequently with quality
Make use of ”events”
Festivals, trends on social media, or add “#”
Check before posting
Evaluate the performance bi-weekly or monthly
What kind of posts gain more “likes”, “shares”, “comments” and “reaches”
When to post?
The contents
Keep increasing the “good” posts
Set quantitative goals to increase followers
annual and monthly
The second one is what is being done at the civic building, festivals and a lot of topics.

12. Respond to Inquiries Respond directly via social media
The way to respond varies
Respond directly via social media
A form for customers to fill in
Employee’s contact information
Reply with “Thank you for the inquiry” + related staff’s title or name + phone number or address

13. Challenges How to deal with some public comments?
Whom are we speaking for?

14. Public Comments on Social Media
Negative comments or complaints are totally fine
Concern I some issues are beyond CUPF’s control
CUPF depends on school site staff to do what needs to be done
Concern II: CUPF responses need to be sensitive to interests of many stakeholders
Some responses to issues may be too personal or sensitive to post publicly
Is it possible to screenshot how we answer such kinds of questions and share it on social media? A “Q & A” section on social media?

15. Whom Are We Speaking for?
So many stakeholders
School staff
More than 5,000 user groups
Parks
ICB members ……
When a response if put down in writing, it means we are speaking for all of them when that may or may not be the case. 

16. Questions?
That’s my presentation, and thank you for listening. Do you have any questions?