How to listen to the Voice of the Digital Citizen? .

What is the impact on the interaction with citizens?

European citizens sense digitalization as an opportunity for policy makers to accompany changes in areas such as employment, privacy, and personal health. The better citizens are informed the more likely they will trust them and have a positive opinion of them.

Citizens see it as a positive improvement in their relationship with governments and institutions: faster and accurate information, more transparency in the decision-making process and more involvement in the design of new policies. This might lead to better support in future developments.

Conclusion

Understanding of the citizens opinions in this online world is of key importance. So collecting data is one thing, but crucial is being able to gain insights and make predictions based on these large amounts of data.

What are your challenges SAS can solve?

• Sense what citizens think about a policy or an implementation of new proposals
• Increase citizens trust and confidence in policymakers
• Know how to communicate with impact on social media to get the desired response
• Detect fake news and prevent urban legends
• Monitor foreign news to anticipate potential coming problems
• Understand relationships between citizens shatter and macroeconomic events

How the Citizens Sonar will help you become citizen centric?

Citizens Sonar

Mine all data on the topics of interests to gain insights that matter for your organization. From economic trends to mental health. SAS has done several opinion mining projects to make sense of text data and drive impact on public decisions.

Our all-in-one integrated solution automatically detects trend-breaks, links or suspicious networks of social media posts and offers topnotch intel visualization capabilities (visual investigator). Due to a third party partnership we can unlock and analyze social media data, even share insights externally in a legal compliant way.

Citizens Experience

Always wondered why people do not respond to your request for information, why you lose traffic on your website and your surveys get low response rates. SAS provides insights on how citizens interact with your website, what sticky and slippery pages are and helps you provide the same experience citizens have in the private sector. Showing that public organizations care and are up to date when it comes to citizens experience.

Citizens Journeys

Want to go from a one way to a two-way communication across different citizens interaction touch points. SAS helps to make sure citizens remain engaged and informed on the topics that matter to them. Helping you to get a loyal and informed citizens base.

SAS has a unique solution set connecting data, analytics and interactions with citizens combined with extensive experience in the public sector resulting in the impact you want to have on the citizens.

Let us dive into a proven 'Citizens Sonar' project

Why?

SAS wanted to help EU’s goal to reach 70% vaccination rate.

What?

We built a dashboard that explores how Dutch and Belgian citizens feel about the covid vaccines: How positively or negatively do they feel about certain vaccine manufacturers, what are their issues with the vaccines, which side effects are they reporting?

How?

We used SAS Visual Text Analytics solution, using several Natural Language Processing techniques to analyze over 400,000 social media posts: Our hybrid approach combines a handcrafted concept taxonomy which can recognize vaccine manufacturers, side effects, objections on the one hand, with AI-based text analytical methods such as sentiment analysis and topic detection on the other.

Conclusions?

The dashboard allows institutions to track and cross-reference the public sentiment about the vaccines with the specific manufacturer and events in time. Another useful result shows which side effects are associated with which vaccine, which allows institutions to compare these associations with research findings and debunk spurious associations in information campaigns.

Topic detection results show that the nature of discussion seems to be quite different between, for instance, news article comments, and open forums, which empowers institutions to target their campaigns to the right medium.

Finally, the dashboard gives institution a sense of the reasons people have reservations regarding the vaccines, and how these reasons shift over time, allowing them to address conspiracy theories and misinformation head-on as well as track the source of these problems.

Social media opinion mining process

'.....and what if you could predict the future?'

Another important feature of the EU Sonar is the early warning systems. Our developed product has been applied in some other global and important organizations. We are proud that the predecessor of EU Sonar has been implemented by the United Nations and has proven that online conversations provide an early indicator of changing employment conditions.

Social media and online conversations were used to really add dept to the unemployment statistics. The qualitative information offered by social media was compared with the standard unemployment figures. A lot of social media data was generated to gain insights into populations coping mechanisms. We generated a mood score based upon the tone of the conversations that we monitored. That quantified data was then analyzed by our advanced analytics software.

Social media and online conversations were used to really add dept to the unemployment statistics. The qualitative information offered by social media was compared with the standard unemployment figures. A lot of social media data was generated to gain insights into populations coping mechanisms. We generated a mood score based upon the tone of the conversations that we monitored. That quantified data was then analyzed by our advanced analytics software.

If you would like to read some more about this project, go to the article that the UN published about it .Using Social Media and Online Conversations to add Depth to Unemployment Statistics • UN Global Pulse