The Regional Hub of Civil Service in Astana in cooperation with the Ministry of Information and Communication of the Republic of Kazakhstan organized a seminar on strategic digital communications for the representatives of the press-services of Kazakhstan’s government bodies.

In his welcoming remarks Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Regional Hub Alikhan Baimenov mentioned that “globalization, proliferation of modern communication technologies, is both a challenge and an opportunity for public sector, leading to the change of the very nature of the government-citizen relations. Governments are said to start working in a quasi-competitive environment; in this context the effective usage of the digital communication tools becomes extremely important”.

Managing partner and senior consultant of the Center of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing (CEPSM, Canada) Mike Kujawski gave and overview of the global and country-specific trends in social media engagement in the public sector He also had a separate session on specific topics like development of digital strategies, differentiation of the online publics, creation of the effective and catching content (visuals, video) techniques. Much discussion has been held around such topics as a rise of digital government, digital governments/cities in action, citizen-centered content and communication, bilingual and trilingual content management, etc.  

The seminar was a successful platform for learning and networking. The agenda was rich in practical examples and cases of effective ways of using social media platforms for impactful web-presence of the government bodies; it also covered such themes like risk management, monitoring and analysis of the social media data for adjusting and strategizing the digital strategy.  The participants also had a hands-on training using the “Strategic Social Media Engagement Workbook”, developed by CEPSM based on the best Canadian practices in public sector communications.

The seminar was held to support and promote the implementation of five institutional reforms as well as Kazakhstan’s identity in mass media, Internet, new-generation media and social networks.

As a result of the workshop there has been created an online platform for the exchange of practices, opinions, and knowledge for the press-services of Kazakhstani government bodies.