Using GC Notify for updates on ESDC’s new grants & contributions

Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) helps organizations by providing funding opportunities. Their grants and contributions (Gs&Cs) help with various aspects of people’s lives, such as providing financial opportunities, incentivizing educational advancement, and supporting accessibility and inclusion.

Many public servants at ESDC are involved in managing grants & contributions programs, including the Modernization and Continuous Improvement Unit. They work on initiatives to improve how people learn about and access ESDC’s grants & contributions, including developing solutions to modernize how programs are delivered.

One of the public servants working on this team is Alejandra Frankovich (Program Advisor). She’s sharing the story of how her team adopted GC Notify to improve communications for ESDC’s funding opportunities. GC Notify is a free messaging solution, built and managed by the Canadian Digital Service (CDS). Government teams use it to send service updates and keep the public informed every step of the way.

Improving experiences with ESDC’s grants & contributions

ESDC grants & contributions: what they are and how they help

Our department (ESDC) manages over 40 programs that offer grants and contributions for various communities to apply for. All funding opportunities are posted in a filterable list and help support jobs, training, and social development.

Grants are payments made to individuals or organizations, such as the Apprenticeship Incentive Grant that helps people pay for expenses while training as an apprentice in a designated Red Seal trade. The training and certifications for these trades are government regulated, such as hairstylists, electricians, and mechanics. Contributions are similar to grants but pay via reimbursements, such as the Foreign Credential Recognition Program that helps governments and agencies pay for the cost of assessing the skills of newcomers and bridging gaps.

Working at the Modernization and Continuous Improvement Unit

My name’s Alejandra Frankovich and I work as a Program Advisor at the Modernization and Continuous Improvement Unit. This unit is part of ESDC’s Program Operations Branch, which is responsible for the operation and coordination of the over 40 grant and contributions programs across the department.

Specifically, my team works to improve how the department delivers grants and contributions through better client experiences and modernized service delivery approaches. We don’t work for a specific funding program – we’re at a horizontal level helping all the programs increase awareness of their opportunities. We do things like collaborating with the Citizen Services Branch to improve web pages (ensuring content is accessible and in plain language), simplifying web templates to be user-friendly, and process mapping to improve the efficiency of our internal procedures and timelines.

To help us make data-driven improvements, we collaborate with many other teams in the department – from the web team looking at how people access information online, to gaining valuable data from the client experience team conducting surveys with people using our services. Having access to all those different teams gives us a lot of information and helps us improve the experience of people searching and applying for funding opportunities.

One of the improvements we’ve made to our funding communications is developing an email notification service using GC Notify, which the Citizen Services Branch’s Principal Publisher team helped us implement on canada.ca.

Using GC Notify to update subscribers of new ESDC funding opportunities

Choosing a solution that’s easy and trustworthy

Another change we wanted to make to ESDC’s funding communications is increasing transparency and fairness. Before adopting GC Notify, each program notified people of new funding opportunities using their social media and mailing lists of previous clients who received funding (because they had their contact information on file). This resulted in a lot of repeat clients, which we’re happy to support, but we also want to help new organizations who haven’t benefited in the past / maybe haven’t heard of the opportunities.

We heard about Health Canada’s use of GC Notify for their “Get Updates on COVID-19” service and realized there’s an internal tool at our disposal that we could leverage for sending emails out to the public. Since GC Notify is owned and managed by the GC, it made it a lot more appealing than other options we were exploring. It ensured the tool is bilingual, accessible, and secure – all important things for GC communications. We also liked that we can share feedback about helpful features and be involved in future iterations of the tool, whereas we wouldn’t get as much access and influence using a third-party tool.

Setting up our notification service to increase awareness

In fall 2022, we set up our email notification service with the help of Principal Publisher and GC Notify. Using the tool, we created an English and French notification service so the public can subscribe to get notified of new opportunities in their preferred language. So far, we have over 16,000 subscribers.

We’re taking a strategic approach to sending notifications so subscribers only receive valuable information. We limit emails to once a week, though we skip weeks if there aren’t any new opportunities posted.

We haven’t received feedback yet from our subscribers, but the fact that thousands of people were subscribing before we started promoting it shows it’s of interest. We’ve started promoting it on social media and are planning more promotions in the future to increase awareness!

Helpful GC Notify features: API & templates

Right now, the most helpful features for us are the API and templates. The API automatically updates our subscriber lists for us, so we don’t have to worry about that. We then use our templates for new funding opportunities to create emails. All we have to do is put the program title and link to the funding page in the email template, then press send. It’s all very seamless and doesn’t take a lot of time to offer this helpful service to the public.

We’re always thinking about future iterations of this service, such as having themed options to subscribe to like Health Canada’s Recalls and Safety Alerts service. This is something we’re exploring for future versions, as we’re building more funding opportunities.

Forward planning: Building GC Forms for funding programs

Another exciting initiative my team is exploring is the use of GC Forms for more efficient client communications! GC Forms enables public servants to create and publish accessible, bilingual, and secure web forms, no coding required. With GC Forms, we can have required answers (can’t submit without) and provide guidance for answers, resulting in higher data accuracy and less back-and-forth (and less paper!).

We like that GC Forms is GC owned and operated like GC Notify (both products are built and maintained by CDS). The branding and privacy features of the tool are also big selling features for us because our clients need trustworthy and secure ways to send us their information (up to Protected B data).

Reach out if you have questions

I’ve reached out to the GC Notify team before for support in order to increase our daily email limit and they responded in no time and updated our sending limits! It was amazing because I didn’t have to go through a long IT process – it was seamless, quick and easy.

If you have any questions about the tool, they have a contact form, as well as upcoming demos. Or if you have questions about how my team’s using GC Notify, you can email me.