Overview
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sits within the Executive Office of the President, and was established to prepare the Federal budget. The Management side regularly supports the White House and its many programs. A large part of its’ role is to communicate policies to both the internal and external workforce.
Challenges
The OMB was challenged with finding ways to communicate and connect better with the front line as well as with stakeholders outside of government. If they could join the policy development conversations early on, then there would be shared feedback and more awareness of policy tools and guidelines.
Their process of collecting and tracking answers to open-ended questions from a wide range of respondents normally took 9-10 months. They needed a better way to gather and organize input.
Solution
The office had a team shortlist a handful of idea management solutions, who were drawn to IdeaScale for three reasons:
- FedRAMP certified
- Past successful partnership with the Obama Administration
- Modern technology and fast user experience
With IdeaScale, the team was blown away by how fast they were able to create a community (within six weeks) and then run a major crowdsourcing campaign (within another six weeks). They were also impressed with how supportive the IdeaScale team was throughout the onboarding process.
Refined Cross-agency Collaboration
OMB uses IdeaScale’s crowdsourcing platform to bring internal and external stakeholders into policy development conversations early, to better inform their policy decisions.
Build Engagement and Get Buy-in for Decisions
By using IdeaScale and asking questions early on, the OMB is getting stakeholder buy-in and creating strong advocates.
Making more Well-informed Decisions Faster
IdeaScale has enabled the OMB to communicate with partners on a timeline defined in weeks instead of months!
