Category: Communication

Newtown's Youtube Video Problems: Resolved???

Posted on 17 Sep 2024, 01:15 - Category: Communication

The First View of Newtown Township Website Analytics!

At the April 26, 2021, Newtown Technology and Communications Committee (T&CC) Zoom meeting, several people complained that it was difficult to navigate the township website (www.newtownpa.gov) and find the information they were seeking (listen to the discussion). 

Considering that the website is the main way that the township communicates with residents, it is crucial that its usability be improved. As Peter Drucker, who was arguably the world's greatest management consultant, famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

Google Analytics

It just so happens that Google Analytics is one of the best tools available to “measure” the usability of websites – and it’s freely available. All that is required is a Google account and a special code to be inserted in every page, both of which are currently in use by the township.

The quest for a Google Analytics report for the township website goes back the June 13, 2018, BOS meeting. At that meeting, Josephine Vlastaris, who was then Chair of the Technology Committee, recommended using Google Analytics to monitor traffic and bounce rate for the township website, and make changes to pages as needed.

This issue was taken up recently by the revamped Newtown Township Technology & Communications Committee (T&CC), which requested a whole slew of analytics data. In response to that request, Beth Leone, Newtown Township Technology Director, ran Google Analytics on the township website for the period of Apr 1, 2021 through Sep 20, 2021. Several Reports were generated, which you can find in my DataBank.

This is my personal preliminary, non-expert analysis of the data submitted to the T&CC. A more definitive official report will be made in by T&CC experts in the near future and presented to the Board of Supervisors.

How Many Pages Are Visited?

Probably the most important parameter to keep track of is "pageviews." A pageview is an instance of an Internet user visiting a particular page on a site. A pageview is recorded whenever a full page of the website is viewed or refreshed. Unique Pageviews is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. Repeated views of a single page are not counted as unique views.

The Newtown website had 42,413 unique Pageviews from Apr 1, 2021 through Sep 20, 2021, which works out to 7,480 unique pageviews per month (divide 42,413 by 5.67 months). Compare that with my website, which averaged only 1,897 unique pageviews per month during the same period (read "Google Analytics and the Township’s Website").

What Were the TOP Pages Viewed?

Google Analytics can show you the Top 10, 25, 100, or whatever, pages viewed. Figure 1 shows data for the Top 10 township website pages viewed during the period Apr 1, 2021 through Sep 20, 2021. You can download the data for ALL of the 1395 pages.

To no-one's surprise, the home page (index.php) is the #1 paged viewed with 12,496 unique views. The other top pages include the municipal office contact page and permit applications page as well as other zoning related pages. The township police page surprisingly is #2 on the list. Also up there is the Board of Supervisors page and the Parks & Recreation page.

Obviously, many visitors are looking to contact the township regarding permits, zoning issues, and police matters. It seems to me that while many ordinary citizens may be accessing these pages, perhaps a majority of visitors are contractors, lawyers, etc. representing clients looking for specific information.

Why is the police department page so high on the list, especially since there is no direct link to it on the home page? I’ve heard that the police department gets many requests for arrest data either from lawyers or from people who are incarcerated. Or it could be that during this period the department was activity seeking to hire new officers and outside sites may have driven potential applicants to the police department to learn more about the department.

The minutes and agendas page is the 5th most visited page. On average, visitors spend more than 5 minutes on this page navigating through the menus trying to find what they are looking for. The time spent on most other pages is under one minute. See my lesson on how to access and download meeting agendas and minutes:

Committee Pageviews

In July and August, 2021, committee members were asked to respond to a survey that asked: “Is your Committee using the Township Website?” To date, 12 responses have been received. When asked “If available, would your committee like to utilize the Township's website to post important committee and/or government topics?” all respondents chose “Yes, please.”

Unfortunately, many committee members were not aware that their committee can have useful information posted to its page on the township website. Consequently, these pages include just the bare minimum of information about the mission and members of the committee. Partially due to the lack of information on the page, most committee pages are not visited often as demonstrated by the data in Table 1.

Related data for other committees:

• Parks & Recreation Board: 4.1 sessions per month
• Human Relations Commission: 18.7 sessions per month

The dearth of useful information on a page is not the only reason for low pageviews. Another factor is how users are driven to the page. For more on that, see “Where Do Users Come From” at the end of this post.

Bounce Rates

Let’s look at the bounce rates. A “bounce” means that the visitor had no interaction with the page other than perhaps reading what was on it. They came and then left the site immediately without clicking on any link. As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. You can see that most of the bounce rates for top pages is within the average range.

Bounce rates vary depending on the page. The bounce rate for the minutes and agendas page is 37.33% whereas for the Human Relations Commission page it is 74.53%. Perhaps many visitors think this is where they can find a well-paying township job!

I note that there are two conspicuous peaks in the pageviews chart; one on or about July 17, 2021 and another at the end of June 2021. I am not sure what caused these peaks. A deeper dive into the data might shed more light on this.

How Many Users Visit the Site?

A user is a unique person who has come to the website. A user can visit and leave the website multiple times per day. Each time they visit, do stuff, and leave is a “session.” The first time a person visits the site, a Google Analytics cookie will be set and a unique identifier will be assigned to that user. This then is used to distinguish the person as a “new user.”

Figure 2 below shows information about township website users and sessions for the period Apr 1, 2021 through Sep 20, 2021. Here “Users” is a total count of users during the report period, and “New Users” is just users in the report period that had only their first visit to the property during that period.

During the time period for the report, 85% of users were “new users.” I would have expected that the percent of “new users” would be lower. I am not an expert in interpreting these data and must leave it up to the experts to determine what this means.

What Day of the Week Do Users Visit the Website?

One more piece of data is the number of users by time of day, shown in the Figure 3 below.

It is obvious from this chart on the left that most visits to the township website occur during the work week and during normal business hours, This tells me that the majority of visits are business related – probably by lawyers, contractors, etc. This confirms what was interpreted from the top pages visited.

Just for the sake of comparison, the chart on the right shows the data for my website, which is geared more to the typical layperson/resident. It’s interesting that in both cases the peak day of the week is Wednesday – the “hump day!”

The majority (57%) of visitors to the township website use desktop computers to access the site while 40% use mobile phones and 2 % use tablets.

Where Do Users Come From?

One of the most important pieces of information to gauge a website’s usefulness is the origin of visitors; i.e., referrers such as websites, search engines, etc. Figure 4 shows the referrers to my website (www.johnmacknewtown.info) during the month of April, 2021.

Unfortunately, this information was not included in the dataset presented to the T&CC. If we had these data, we may have discovered why certain pages, such as the police department page, received so many pageviews. 

What's Next?

The goal of collecting and analyzing these data is to identify problems that can be fixed. Ultimately, the long-range goal is to make the site easier to use and to provide more useful information for Newtown residents. The T&CC discussed some ways to drive more visits to the website such as via social media, search engine optimization, etc. Committees should also update their pages often with useful information.

Whatever is done, we need to periodically run Google Analytics to measure the result. 

Posted on 29 Sep 2021, 13:18 - Category: Communication

Mack’s Guide to the Newtown Township Website. Lesson 2: How to Access Financial Information

This lesson will show you how to access important township financial information. It specifically will focus on how to find Bills Lists (and Treasurer’s Reports) on the township website and how to analyze the data for useful insights. [View the Video below.]

As a resident, you may be interested to see exactly how you tax dollars are being spent, by whom, and who gets those dollars. The Bills List is a great way to find that information.

As always, the first step is to go to the homepage, which is www.newtownpa.gov.

The logical place to start is Finance Department page, which you can access via the DEPARTMENTS drop-down menu (see Figure 1 below).

There’s lots of interesting financial information here such as the approved and annual budgets, financial statements – which are yearly audits - and monthly treasurer’s reports, etc. These are high-level data, but not data about who gets paid for what. We’ll look at the Treasurer’s Report at the end of this lesson.

But there is no folder for Bills Lists!

OK, so here’s my first secret I have for finding the Bills Lists: You have to open the GOVERNMENT drop-down menu and roll your mouse pointer over “Boards and Committees” and then careful move the pointer over to the submenu and click on “Board of Supervisors.”

This will bring you to the Township Board of Supervisors page, which you may think is not the most likely place to find Bills Lists. Stay with me and we will find out why the Bills Lists are available from this page.

Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the screen below the pretty faces of the five supervisor guys and up will pop “Supervisor Meeting Minutes & Agendas” with a list of years (see Figure 2).

Suppose you are interested in seeing one or more Bills Lists approved by the BOS in 2021.

Although this list does not mention Bills Lists, if you click on the year 2021 you will see a “Bills List” folder along with folders for Agendas, Minutes, Treasurer Reports and Zoom Meetings! [View the video below.] These are all items that Supervisors might be interested in and so they are located on this page. That’s my guess anyway. If it were up to me, I would include the Bills List folder on the Finance Department page as well.

Anyway, let’s click on the Bills List folder to open it. Let's look at the Bills List for July 14, 2021, which is at the end of the list. [View the Video below.]

Note that all the Bills Lists are PDF documents. If you click on "07 July 14", you will see a preview of the July 14, 2021, Bills List.

You can scroll down this preview and see every invoice that needs to be paid or was paid in this cycle (actually these are bills that were approved to be paid at the July 14, 2021, BOS meeting; that's why Bills Lists are found on the Supervisors page). For example, on page 1 you will see a bill for $1,213 from Bella Commercial Services for June Janitorial Services/Parks.

Up at the top of the screen you should see several options such as printing or sharing the document. You also can download the document. Let’s try that. [View the Video below.]

Click on the downward pointing arrow and voila! The document should open up on your computer if you have a PDF reader set up to automatically open PDF files when downloaded.

A Secret About PDF Files

There are two types of PDF documents: ones that are “searchable” and ones that are NOT. A searchable PDF file is a PDF file that includes text that can be searched using the standard Adobe Reader “search” function. In addition, the text can be selected and copied and pasted into other applications such an Excel spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, the Bills List PDF documents are NOT searchable. You call tell that by the shape of the cursor, which is a crosshair rather than a bracket.

Let me show you what that means if you try and search for information. [View the video below.] Say you want to find bills related to legal fees related to the proposed Wawa on the Bypass. Now, you don’t know if this Bills List includes any invoices for that so you logically would use the PDF reader’s search function to find any Wawa-related legal bills. Let’s try that.

Type Wawa into the search box and click on “Find Next in Current Document.” Whoops! “No matches found.” Oh, well, I guess there aren’t any such bills.

But wait! Even if you search for a word you know is in this document such as “Newtown” it says not found! That can’t be right. What’s going on?

In order to search for text in a PDF file, it must be a converted to a searchable PDF file. Because I have the proper software, I can convert this non-searchable/non-readable Bills List into a searchable/readable document by using the Adobe’s built-in OCR Text Recognition function.

[BTW, early on in my Supervisor career, I got the township to post only searchable Minutes of meetings show that residents can sift through these sometimes lengthy documents to find what they are looking for without the need to have and know how to use OCR Text Recognition software.]

Now that this is a searchable PDF, if we search for "Wawa" what we find is that there are two bills from KILKENNY LAW LLC related to WAWA, one posted in MAY21 for $1,764.00 and one posted in JUN21 for $2,254.00.  [View the Video below.]

There is no information about what these bills are for. To learn that, you must request copies of the invoices. But I can tell you that these bills are for representing the township at the Zoning Hearing Board opposing Wawa’s requests for variances to the zoning. For more on that, listen to my audio clips from the July 8, 2021, ZHB meeting.

Let’s see what we can do with the KILKENNY LAW FIRM data.

Basically, now that the PDF file is readable, it is possible to copy and paste the data into an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, this involves a few steps. I’ll skip the details and show the results. As you can see, the total for KILKENNY bills is $13,157.67 and bills for Wawa make up 30.5% of the total. See Figure 3 below.

That’s interesting, but what is more interesting is an analysis of how much money the township spent on legal fees for a whole year, including a breakdown of how much was paid to each law firm and for what general purpose. I did this for 2020 (see Figure 4 below).

First, you can see that there were more than 200 bills from law firms paid in 2020 for a total of $161,111.16. [View the Video below.] This happens to be 8% over the 2020 budgeted amount of $149,000.

I broke down the bills into 3 broad legal categories: Solicitor, Litigation, and Labor. 73% of the 2020 paid bills were for “solicitor”, which is a fancy term for a lawyer advising the various committees and boards regarding correctly applying local, state and national laws. Only 16% involved “litigation.” The KILKENNY fees for Wawa, for example, fall into that category.

In 2020, the budget allocated $65,000 to pay for solicitor fees from KILKENNY. Actually, KILKENNY was paid nearly $126,000, which is 78% of the total legal fees paid by the township in 2020.

Treasurer's Report

Unfortunately, I cannot do this type of analysis every year for every type of expenditure. The Treasurer’s Report is a good source of information of this sort but on a monthly basis.

For example, we can go back to the Supervisor webpage and access the May 2021 Treasurer’s Report. Figure 5 shows the page related to POLICE SERVICES for that month and Year-to-Date and compares that to what was budgeted.

While the Treasurer’s Report is very informative it does not break down payments into specific categories such as legal fees paid to specific law firms for which purpose. So, I still rely on the Bills List for that sort of detail.

I hope you found this lesson interesting. Perhaps you will do your own different analysis and get back to me about what you learn.

View The Video

Posted on 21 Jul 2021, 01:17 - Category: Communication

Mack’s Guide to the Newtown Township Website. Lesson 1: How to Access Official Meeting Agendas and Minutes

Let's suppose you wish to attend an upcoming public meeting such as the next meeting of the Board of Supervisors (BOS) or Planning Commission or other official committee. But you want to make sure you know what’s on the agenda so that you don’t waste your time going to a meeting that won’t cover any issue you care about. This lesson will show you how to do that using the Newtown Township website. You can use the same steps to access the minutes and Zoom recordings of previous meetings.

EXTRA BONUS: The steps outlined here can also be used to access approved minutes and Zoom recordings of past meetings.

The first step, of course, is to go to the homepage, which is newtownpa.gov. You should see this nice page that includes a big scrolling video (Figure 1). Kind of cool, right? No other municipal website that I know of dedicates so much of its homepage to graphics.

In any case, you also see the main sections of the website: HOME, COMMUNITY, BUSINESS, GOVERNMENT, DEPARTMENTS, and CONTACT. Since the BOS is part of the Newtown government, it would be logical to click on “GOVERNMENT,” but I like to first see the calendar. You need to scroll down to see that.

Click on the down arrow and up will pop the bottom of the screen (see Figure 2). Very useful links and information here, but no calendar. You have to scroll further down to see that.

Further down the page, we see the column of “Upcoming Township Meetings.” Here you will see most – BUT NOT ALL – of the upcoming scheduled meetings. For example, I do not see any Board of Supervisors meeting listed here.

What you have to do is scroll further down until you see the calendar icon near the bottom of the screen. Click on that. Now you will see the “Newtown Township Calendar of Events and Meetings” (Figure 3).

If you scroll further down this screen you will see that there is a "BOARD OF SUPERVISORS ZOOM MEETING” scheduled for June 23, 2021. When you click on that you will see that this meeting will be on a Wednesday at 7 PM. It says the LOCATION is the Newtown Township Public Meeting Room, but that cannot be correct because this is a Zoom meeting.

There are also links here that allow you to add this meeting to your personal calendar. I don’t like to mess with that. What we want is to find is the agenda for this meeting, but I see no links to get me to that.

Now what?

Maybe we should have clicked on the GOVERNMENT menu item on the top of the page and saved a lot of time! Let’s do that now. Actually, you only have to roll your mouse pointer over “GOVERNMENT” and you will see a menu pop up.

Whoops! I don’t see “Board of Supervisors” on the menu, so I guess we have to click on “Boards & Committees.” Actually, don’t click on it, just roll your mouse pointer over it and ANOTHER menu will pop up and lo and behold there’s “Board of Supervisors” as the number 2 choice.

What you have to do now is carefully roll your mouse pointer over to the second pop-up menu and click on “Board of Supervisors”. This will get you to the “Township Board of Supervisors” page (see the video at the end of this post).

On the Township Board of Supervisors page you learn that the BOS meets on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month. This is true, except when it isn’t, such as when a meeting is cancelled for some reason or another.

Anyway, you will see a list of past Zoom meetings and other information such as a link to watch previous meetings and the mission of the Board of Supervisors.

Step-by-Step Guide

OK. Here’s a step-by-step guide on what you need to do to get to the agenda of the June 23 BOS meeting (see the video embedded at the end):

1. Scroll down further on the Township Board of Supervisors page and you will see “Supervisor Meeting Minutes & Agendas.” This is what we need.
2. Scroll further down and click on “2021”. There’s an information icon (the letter “i” in a circle) that you can click. But that just tells me when this item was created. Forget about that!
3. Click on the highlighted “2021” menu item and you will see a number of choices. Again, this is useful non-agenda and non-minutes information such as the “Bills List” item, which will lead you to all the bills paid by the township in 2021!
4. But we’re interested in finding the agenda for the June 23, 2021, meeting, so click on “Agendas.” You should see a list of  2021 meeting agendas to date.

Unfortunately, the agenda for the June 23, 2021, meeting is not yet available because most agendas are not posted until just a few days before the meeting. Actually, the law requires that the agendas – or at least public notices announcing the date, time, and location of official meetings – be posted no later than 24 hours before the meeting. The Board of Supervisors agendas are usually posted at the close of business on the Friday before the meeting. Thus, the agenda for the June 23, 2021, meeting will not be available until June 18.

Let's find a meeting that is closer to our search date (June 13, 2021). If we go back to the Calendar we see that there is Planning Commission meeting scheduled for June 15, 2021. Let’s try that.

First, click on “PLANNING COMMISSION ZOOM MEETING” in the Calendar. You will see the time and location – correctly noted as “Zoom” – for this meeting, and other “Event Details,” but no direct link to the agenda.

Let’s go to the Planning Commission page and see if we can find the agenda for the June 15, 2021 meeting there. Click on “Planning Commission page” under EVENT DETAILS in the Calendar. Unfortunately, you’ll need to roll you mouse pointer over items like this to realize that they are clickable.

The Planning Commission page looks very similar to the Township Board of Supervisors page. However, if you scroll down you do NOT see a “Meeting Minutes & Agendas” list as with the Supervisors page. This is true for every committee page.

Darn!

Here’s My “Secret” to Finding Meeting Agendas

In order to find agendas for upcoming meetings of any committee other than the Board of Supervisors, we need a different way of doing it. I’ll let you in on my secret way of accessing more information about upcoming meetings including agendas and minutes of past meetings PLUS the agenda of the next scheduled meeting (if we are lucky).

1. Go back to the top of the page and open/click on the GOVERNMENT menu.
2. Click on “Minutes & Agendas.” This is the door to the magic kigdom of agendas and minutes!
3. Scroll down the list until you find the board, committee, or commission you are interested in. In this case, click on “Planning Commission.” It may require two clicks before it works.

Now we can follow the same procedure we followed with the Board of Supervisors:

4. Pick the year you are interested in; i.e., 2021. Click/double click on that.
5. You now should see just 3 folders: Agendas, Minutes, Zoom Meetings. You might think to click on the latter, but don’t unless you want see the archive of PAST Zoom meetings. Click on “Agendas.” BONUS: Obviously, from here you can also access approved minutes and Zoom recordings of past meetings.
6. Aha! There it is at the bottoem of the list! It's a file titled “06 June 15.pdf”  (ignore the “06” in the name – it’s a mystery). Click on that and you finally see the agenda, which you can download to your computer (see the video at the end of this post to see how to do this). It may take a few moments to load – have patience. This is a Google function we are working with and who knows what evil lurks there!

Hurray! Success!

Just SIX not so “easy” steps. I’m sure, however, that once you do this 5 or 6 times. It will be second nature!

UNFORTUNATELY, this is the ONLY way you can get the login information you need to join the Zoom meetings, like this one for the Planning Commission. For live meetings, you just show up; i.e., get dressed nicely, drive to the township municipal building, park, and walk in to take a seat.

NOTE: When you attend live committee meetings, try to sit close to the committee members if you wish to hear them. For some reason, only televised Board of Supervisors meetings use the speakers in the room so that members of the public sitting at the back can hear what’s going on.

View the Video

An Easier Way

Now that you know my secret, let me tell you another secret. I do all this work for you so you do not have to. Just visit the “Upcoming Meetings” on my website.

Better yet – subscribe to my email notification/newsletter service. I sent out notifications of upcoming meetings once or twice a month depending on activity. Subscribe here.

Posted on 13 Jun 2021, 11:09 - Category: Communication

Incorporating Zoom Into Live BOS Meetings

An important mission of the Newtown Township Technology and Communications Committee (TC&C) is to improve communications between the Township and its residents through the use of technology.

At a recent TC&C meeting, I was asked to provide some examples of how other townships use technology to improve communications with residents. To answer that I posted "Some Ideas for Improving Township Communications with Residents," which includes a comparison of how local municipalities use social media compared to Newtown.

Today I visited the Doylestown Township website to find out more about the passage of a resolution recognizing Juneteenth; i.e., June 19, which is on a Saturday this year. I did not find the resolution, but I did view the webast of the May 4, 2021, regular meeting of the Doylestown BOS during which the resolution was passed.

Doylestown's webcasts of BOS meetings show how technology can improve communication between supervisors and residents. The May 4 meeting was interesting to me not just because of the Juneteenth resolution, which I have yet to find, but because it demonstrates that live meetings can include participation by residents via Zoom as well as in person. See the screen shots below:

At recent Newtown Township BOS meetings, one or another supervisor has asked when live meetings will return. So far, no specific date has been set, but I have already commented that when live BOS meetings return - which may be after Memorial Day - I hope that somehow we can include participation by residents via Zoom. So far, however, no one has discussed how the township can implement that with the archaic system it has in place. Unfortunately, the May meeting of the TC&C has been cancelled because it was scheduled for Monday, May 31 - i.e., Memorial Day! I hope, however, to bring this up again at the next BOS meeting.

P.S. If you would like to help us implement better technology-enabled resident communications in Newtown, please consider joining the Technology and Communications Committee. It’s difficult to achieve a quorum with only 4 members currently. The TC&C meets only once per month via Zoom.

If you are interested in serving, please submit a letter of interest and resume to Olivia Kivenko, Newtown Township, 100 Municipal Drive, Newtown, PA 18940, by email to oliviak@newtownpa.gov 

Posted on 06 May 2021, 01:38 - Category: Communication