The National Environment Agency (NEA) of Singapore has won the E-Government Award at this year’s FutureGov Awards for its rapid implementation of a haze monitoring and public information portal during the haze crisis.
When Singapore was badly hit by the haze last June,
the NEA website attracted as many as 5 million visitors in a day.
To ensure that accurate and timely information is easily accessible by the public, the agency launched a haze microsite within 72 hours and delivered frequent updates through multiple channels, including RSS, TV feeds, a call centre system, an mobile app and social media.
Besides rapid implementation of the haze microsite,
NEA also enhanced its corporate website within 48 hours to meet the high hit rates of over 120,000 per minute, and 90,000 visitors per minute. This enabled citizens to access information without experiencing any slowness or downtimes.
Through both the microsite and corporate website, NEA provided updates on an hourly basis round the clock, seven days a week. Before the haze crisis, citizens only received updates three times a day.
The monthly number of unique visitors to its corporate website and microsite reached 4.2 million users and 150,000 users respectively during that period.
The agency’s mobile app,
myENV, proved to be very popular during the crisis with citizens too. The number of total downloads increased four times from 100,000 to 450,000.
NEA also increased engagement with the public through its social media channels - NEA Twitter (@NEAsg) and NEA Facebook.