EERE Web Coordinator’s Meeting Minutes
Thursday, September 15, 2016

Attending in Person

EERE Communications – Alex Clayborne, Billie Bates, ActioNet; Leslie Gardner, Adrienne Elmore, NREL; Mike Mueller, Hannon Group

Education – Laura Angle, Clarissa Childers, ActioNet

FEMP – Joe Konrade

Vehicles – Nay Chehab, New West

Attending by Phone

Bioenergy – Reanna Trudell, BCS

Buildings –Julia Rotondo, Alex Isaacson, Energetics; Shan Osborn, PNNL; Wendy Graves, Akoya; Linh Truong, NREL

FEMP –Heather Proc, NREL; Courtney Fieber, DB Interactive

Fuel Cells – Kathy Cisar, NREL

Solar / Sunshot – Susanna Murley, Clean Energy Communications; Greg O’Brien, Hannon Group

Vehicles –Vicki Skonicki, Argonne; Trish Cozart, NREL

Wind and Water – Liz Hartman; Kelly Yaker, NREL

WIP –Monica Arevalo, NREL;Christina Stowers, New West

EERE Communications – Carolyn Hinkley; Elizabeth Spencer, Amy Vaughn Liles, NREL

Summary

This was the 90th meeting of EERE’s web coordinators.

Current Business

Around the Room

  • From the DOE Web Council:
  • There was a demo of the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Service’s Chatbot/Interactive Virtual Assistant (IVA).
  • The Office of Legacy Management presented on Story Maps.
  • Tom O’Neill invited others to join the meetings, which occur on the second Thursday of the month. Tell Carolyn or Tom O’Neill if you want to be added to the Web Council distribution list.
  • Redesign mockups are on Powerpedia.
  • Requests for custom templates for email newsletters (beyond the standard template in GovDelivery) need to go through the WGT process.
  • A reminder to include the Energy.gov redesign in your budget planning, as the switch to the new look and feel will require some review on staging and possibly some revision in the Drupal CMS. Is there any estimate for how much should be built into budgets? It’s very difficult to determine, at this point.
  • Regarding the switchover, if you are hosting sites externally, such as at a lab, inform your tech team that they will need to switch to by the end of December. For all sites, when the switch happens, let your tech rep know if you see anything strange with your sites.
  • The social media page on Communication Standards has been updated. There is also new information on URL shorteners. Is this social media page the same as DOE’s page on social media? No.
  • If you have any updates to the EERE site map, such as new sites, moved sites, or removed sites, let Adrienne know. Carolyn will send the current version out with the meeting minutes.

Funding Opportunities Next Steps

Carolyn described some actions needed with the recent redesign of this site, now called Funding Opportunities. These include updating left navigation, listing open opportunities and RFIs on the top-level funding page, then listing closed opportunities and past RFIs on subpages. See the example in the meeting slides. How should comments be handled, considering Regulations.gov and its opportunity to post responses? For the Quadrennial Energy Review (QER), EPSA put comments in PDF files, posted them on download pages in Energy.gov, and sorted them on a pivot table. Is there a privacy issue with these comments? No, they probably won’t include PII. Where should notices of intent (NOIs) go? At the bottom of the top-level funding page, near “Other Funding Opportunities.” There will be some more offline discussion about this.

All About Amped Up!

Michael Mueller of EE Comms discussed the relaunch of the EERE Amped Up newsletter on Energy.gov. See the meeting slides. Keep in mind that individual stories from Amped Up issues can be used for events such as Energy Awareness Month and for specific office purposes. The Amped Up team can bundle select stories in a package that you can take as hard copies to your event. This publication went to COP21, where it was the second-most-handed-out piece, as well as Solar Decathlon and other events. There are cross-promotional opportunities: Tech offices can link to specific content, and vice-versa. Is the newsletter using a unique GovDelivery list? Not yet – as of now, there is a small number of “fans.”

Next Meeting

October20 at 1 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Mountain, in 5E-069 Forrestal and X300 Golden.