Quik Jab@2016 > How Do You Spell H.E.A.T? . . No S For Sports???

It's gonna be a sweet 2016.
That's the prediction from Bill Jabjiniak, Director for the City of Mesa Office of Economic Development.
Sweet predictions are nice, but sometimes things happen that you can't foresee [like the bull market worldwide New Year's stock-plunge erasing billions in seconds] or what you project for capital investment in a given year doesn't deliver those outcomes in that year, or maybe never.
Another question: Whose lives are gonna be sweet in 2016?
Surely not for the hungry and homeless whose basic needs go unmet with many experiencing food insecurity.
[Readers are invited to read a previous post on this site.]
Feedback from attending the meeting is provided in this post along with access to a wealth of information readers can use from the The Center for Government.org
The EconDev Director's remarks were made this morning to members of the Economic Development Advisory Board at the regular 7:30 a.m. monthly meeting.
The EDAB acts as the advisory board to the Mesa City Council on matters pertaining to economic development, including goal setting, strategic planning, marketing and business recruitment, retention and expansion.
Meetings are on the first Tuesday of every month.  



EDAB Meeting 05 Jan 2016

The membership of the Economic Development Advisory Board includes: nine (9) voting members and up to six (6) ex-officio non-voting members.
Three of the ex-officio members shall be the Mayor, City Manager, and the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mesa Chamber of Commerce.
[the mayor and city manager, and some others, were not present at today's meeting]
Three may be City of Mesa representatives that are currently sitting on the Greater Phoenix Economic Council Board of Directors.
List of members, meeting agendas and meetings can be found here >> EDAB webpage



Bill Jabjiniak with some EDAB members leaning in 

Jabjiniak briefly went over Greater Phoenix Economic Council [GPEC] activities with more details coming in the first quarter.
More time was taken to discuss the continuing economic development benefits from capital investments in H.E.A.T.
- Healthcare
- Higher Education
- Aerospace/Aviation/Defense
- Tourism and Technology
Mesa's Office of Economic Development is guided by these vital industries of opportunity. [see earlier posts for 2016 trends on December 30, 2015 on this site]
A new brochure was handed to EDAB members that answered the question Why HEAT?
 Building on community strengths, quality infrastructure, talented workforce, projected growth, and global market trends, the City of Mesa is already growing and realizing benefits in each industry [sector] of the local economy".
This post is not a "quick jab" at cheerleading [no shaking pompoms] . . . people need to examine the gathering and sourcing of data and question the dependent variables; for example Higher education, with a significant impact on producing the talented workforce that all those sectors want and need to recruit for job-hiring simply cannot deliver the "talented workforce"  due to state budget cuts for education.



Janet Woolum with laptop

Also on the agenda this morning were two presentations:
- WhatWorksCities - Open Data
by Janet Woolum, Mesa's performance administrator who used to work at the AZ Office of Tourism and the Arizona Commerce Authority
- Website Analytics
by Kim Lofgreen, Marketing and Business Development Manager for the City of Mesa.
[There was a You Tube video posted on this blogsite on December 30,2015 uploaded by WhatWorksCities for information purposes]

WhatWorksCities - Open Data
Not off to a good start at the meeting . .  simple graphs that a savvy secondary-school student could do - like plotting median household income for Mesa and Maricopa County from 2005 to 2015 - showing lower growth than in 2008 - were used to show improved prosperity - Huh? Go figure.
In the study of statistics there is a significant difference between the median household income and the average per capita income. Likewise, as one advisory board pointed out, there may be a difference in the number of wage earners living in a household for Maricopa County compared with those numbers in Mesa - important data apparently not discovered.
There was no sense of urgency in the room at all when a visual graphic for 2009-2014 with data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the American Community Survey [public sources available online to anyone] showed that in just the last five years 
Residents of Mesa 
living below the poverty line increased by 50% . . . Huh? Improved prosperity??  Improving people's lives?

[Ms. Woolum entertained many questions and suggestions from advisory board members present about what types of data sources are used and combined in the development of Open Data to help the City of Mesa "elevate and accelerate the use of data and evidence to engage citizens, make government more effective (that is do what works) and improve people's lives".]

WhatWorksCities has been featured in many posts on this blog.
Readers are invited to take a look and use the links provided in the posts on this site.
Mesa was invited to join in August 2015 with eight other cities.
Readers of this blog might want to make sure that both they and  the nine leaders appointed to the WhatWorksCities leadership board here in Mesa get familiar with online resources accessed from The Center for Government http://centerforgov.org/

Your Guide to Open Data
Free guides created by GovEx staff to help your city leverage the use of data to increase transparency, improve decision-making, and deliver results.
Other guides include
Benchmarking
Discovering Data
Getting Meta with Metadata

Website Analytics
Kim Lofgreen's presentation to the Economic Development Board 01/05/2016 started off with definitions of analytic terms to track hits on the website for the City of Mesa's Economic Development lead page: http://mesaaz.gov/business/economic-development
Data was retrieved for Aug 13-Dec 31, 2015 or 153 days in total.
[Information in this post was extracted from a six-page hand-out provided to those in attendance at the EDAB meeting on Tuesday, January 05,2016]

Kim Lofgreen/mesaaz.gov

Space in this post is limited, so let's just take a look at the metrics  [the what] provided for the lead page with the link above in the five categories:
Business/environment
Business districts and maps
Newsroom
About us
Start-up

Some page-view indicators were also provided.

Here are the definitions for terms used:

• Pageviews - the total number of pages viewed
• Unique Pageviews - the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed as least once
• Average Time on Page - the average amount of time users spent viewing a specified page or screen, or set of pages or screens
• Bounce Rate - the percentage of single-page visits [that's visits in which the user left the page without interacting with the page]

The How Much [with numbers rounded-off]
It's important to note in measuring the effectiveness of the City of Mesa's Office for Economic Development website that more than half of users visiting the main or lead page Mesas.gov/economic-development/ - 60.58% to be exact - left the page in 1:37 and did not interact with the page.
Take a look at the lead page here >> http://mesaaz.gov/business/economic-development
[more than half of potential information-seekers were lost]
A reasonable question to ask: Is the design of the lead page effective or producing the desired outcomes?
Furthermore, for about 15,000 unique page views over the course of 150 days = 100 views per day. When you factor in the percentage who left and made a choice not to interact with the page, that leaves about 62 users per day.
Information about Start-Up /start-up/ [a highly-publicized program for helping new businesses] had the least unique page views at 607 with 66.6% [about 470] leaving the page after the longest time spent 2:46 - that adds up to only 137 users in 153 days.
Users were somewhat curious about the business environment and the business district maps [again more than left half and didn't interact with the page]. 
The /newsroom/ was the least accessed with about 1500 unique page views over 150 days, but again with a high bounce rate [57.7%] which means that only about 750 viewers stayed on the page for an average of 1:41 minutes. - an average of only five views per day

The Q4 Economic Reporter Newsletter for Oct-Dec 2015 got 526 unique page views for an average view time of 3:43 [the longest in any item], but again with a high bounce rate = 60.2% where users left the site without interacting with the page.

However, in that stat, the extension /news/ had the significantly lower bounce rate = 8.6%.and there were some page-hit success stories where Infographics were highlighted in both the presentation and table-talk for spikes in use count in four examples:
1. mesaaz.gov/economic/business-district-maps/fiesta-district showing 85 page views on Wed Nov 4, 2015
2. /key industries/medical-devices showing 40 page views from Nov 30-Dec 17
3. /start-up/mesa-sizeup showing 72 page views on Wed September 9, 2015
4. /available-real-estate/mesa-sitesearch showing 72 page views on Wed Sept 9, 2015

 

 

 

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