Public Service Recognition (PSRW) – Celebration Toolkit

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Each year the President and Congress designate the first full week of May as Public Service Recognition Week in honor of the men and women who serve America as federal, state, county and local government employees. We hope you will join GovEvents in celebrating our civilian and military public servants this year. Public Service Recognition Week highlights the accomplishments of the dedicated public servants who work tirelessly on behalf of all Americans and who rarely get the credit they deserve.

 

The Partnership for Public Service and the Public Employees Roundtable (PER) have developed a guide to help you observe Public Service Recognition Week, taking place May 7-13, 2017, in your communities. GovEvents would like to share that guide with our members and audience:

 

There are many ways to celebrate public servants in your community during Public Service Recognition Week (PSRW). Ideas range from sending letters to public employees to organizing a celebration showcasing the work of government agencies in your local area. To help you get started, we put together our top 10 celebration suggestions. For our full list of suggestions, please download the complete How to Celebrate PSRW Guide.

 

We hope this online toolkit will help you observe PSRW in a simple, fun, low-cost way while honoring public employees that work so diligently on our behalf every day. We've included resources to help facilitate your participation in PSRW whether you are from a government agency, Federal Executive Board (FEB), military base or school. In particular, these are ideas and tools to help you reach out to your community, educators and the media.

 

We invite individuals and organizations alike to participate in our PSRW White Board campaign. Start by downloading the White Board guide from the PSRW Resources in the right-hand column of this page. You can also find examples on our Facebook and Instagram pages.

Behind the Curtain: AWS Public Sector Summit 2017

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As federal, state, and local agencies look to implement cloud solutions, either in response to mandates or in an effort to reap cost savings and IT efficiency, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been in the forefront of helping government make the move to cloud. Now in its eighth year, the AWS Public Sector Summit brings together innovators who are changing the world with cloud computing to share their successes and lessons learned to guide wider cloud adoption in government. The conference aims to send attendees back to their office with new strategies and techniques for kicking off new projects, maximizing budgets, and achieving mission goals.

We highlighted the history of the event last year and, once again, Tricia Davis-Muffett, Global Public Sector Marketing Leader for AWS, took some time out from planning the Summit to share what is new for 2017 and what first-time attendees can expect.[Tweet "Behind the Curtain: AWS Public Sector Summit. @AWS_Gov #GovEventsBlog #AWSPSSummit"] Continue reading →

A Picture is Worth 140 Characters

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With shorter attentions spans, the ubiquity of high-quality cameras in our phones, and multiple platforms to share images, photos are becoming a critical marketing tactic for events. Images can convey the mood of an event with more authenticity than any carefully worded tweet. The images taken at an event show what is really happening and hopefully make people want to be a part of it. While it's not critical that images be National Geographic quality, some thought should go into how photos from your event will look. Create an environment that encourages and enables great photos.[Tweet "Images can convey the mood of an event with more authenticity. #GovEventsBlog"]

We've pulled together a couple photo-centric considerations to add into the event planning mix. Continue reading →

How Events Can Embrace the Circle of Life

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Spring conjures up images of new life. From birds hatching to flowers blooming to trees re-growing their leaf canopy. No matter the species, all living things need three things to thrive - food, water, and a hospitable habitat.

The idea of greening events is not new. Event planners and venues have been looking for ways to make events more sustainable and reduce the amount of waste produced from these mass gatherings. Reducing paper with mobile apps and providing recycling and composting options are popular ways to shrink a carbon footprint. We wanted to go beyond those tried and true methods and look at events as a living being, examining how to provide the keys to life in a way that benefits not only attendees, but the planet as whole.[Tweet "Event planners and venues have been looking for ways to make events more sustainable. #GovEventsBlog"] Continue reading →

Zeroing in on Meeting Security

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From time to time GovEvents will come across information we feel our members and audience would benefit from. Here's something we wanted to share:

Are you covering all your bases?

At an employee-training event held inside a San Bernardino, California, government building on Dec. 2, 2015, employees were in the midst of the typical office-worker talk that swills around water coolers. Everything seemed to be moving along smoothly. It appeared to be a very good day, partly because the training would wrap up with the office holiday party. Spirits were cheery.

One employee left early but soon returned with his wife. The couple entered the building and opened fire, shooting more than 100 rounds of ammo, killing 14 of his co-workers and wounding another 22. The attackers fled and were later gunned down in a shoot-out with law enforcement on a public street.

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes that departed from airports in the northeastern United States. The 9/11 attacks killed 2,996 people, injured more than 6,000, and caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage, and incurred $3 trillion in total costs.

Many meeting planners who worked after the 9/11 attacks have their own horror stories to tell. The country was reeling, and planners had to deal with their own losses, personal as well as professional. There were cancelled flights, high attrition, low conference turnouts, demands for registration refunds and a host of other challenges. Since that fateful day more than 15 years ago, the meeting-planning industry has bounced back, but it has also become complacent. Continue reading →