Georgia's Public Website Scoring System Creates Performance Race

PHILADELPHIA — In an effort to increase transparency about how state websites serve constituents, Georgia created a program that scores each website based on quality assurance, accessibility and search engine optimization. The program behind the initiative is the Georgia Analytics Program, or GAP, located within the Georgia Technology Authority.

The state’s Chief Digital and AI Officer Nikhil Deshpande reported that the result has been an increased focus on perfecting digital services.


“It’s not public shaming, but it helps,” he said at a session centered on data-informed digital services at the NASCIO Midyear Conference in Philadelphia, adding that it has fostered an environment where agencies took charge of “owning” their information.

The initiative captures analytics from the web presence of agencies. Deshpande asserted the result created a sense of competition that ultimately serves citizens as agencies are driven to raise their web performance standards.

It also gives them real-time feedback about how the decisions they make impact citizens. If an agency does something like upload a PDF, a document that can cause digital accessibility problems due to incompatibility with screen readers, the digital accessibility score will immediately appear lower.

The cumulative score reflected on the dashboard includes a grade, which ranges from “A” to “C” for Georgia agencies. At press time, the leading website is the State Health Benefit Plan with a score of 93.
Georgia also publicly shares the websites that receive the highest amount of page views, revealing the importance of each agency’s web presence. The Georgia Department of Driver Services, for example, the most visited site, only comprises 3.24 percent of the state’s web traffic.

At NASCIO, Deshpande also spoke about the importance of collecting data to build “personas” for services that turn large populations into real people. When building a new state website, georgia.gov, his team took a 400-mile trip to speak to people in every corner of the state, asking how they use services to learn more about their real-world impact.

Deshpande also pressed the importance of collecting only the data the state needs to deliver services, in a manner that is safe and citizen-focused.

“We have the opportunity to collect many things, that doesn’t mean we should collect everything,” he said, adding that gathering sensitive and non-actionable data simply “isn’t worth it.”