Information, Please

WASHINGTON - When you need to know about federally-backed college loans, who ya gonna call?

Or, what if you need information about filing your taxes?

There's one phone number you can call to get just about any kind of non-classified information about the federal government.

"1-800-FED-INFO is taking calls from all across the country, helping people get answers on any government program, benefit or service."

Theresa Nasif is director of the Federal Citizens Information Center at the General Services Administration's Office of Citizens Services.

She says that 1-800-FED-INFO is part of a growing family of information sources -- some better known than others -- administered by the federal government.

"We're part of the same group that runs the Pueblo, Colorado, Document Distribution Center . . . and in 2003, we added the responbility of running www.usa.gov, the official [Web] portal of the U.S. government," she explained in a recent telephone interview.

Nasif says that 1-800-FED-INFO had its genesis in a very simple idea a little more than four decades ago.

"The National Contact Center started over 40 years ago as a federal information counter at the Federal Building in Atlanta in 1966."

She goes on to say that the counter was started as an effort to help people figure out which government agency they needed to visit at the building.

It was such a good idea, Nassif says, that the Atlanta information counter team expanded to take phone inquiries.

Eventually, federal buildings in other cities, from Anchorage to Miami, and Boston to Honolulu, copied the idea.

In 1978, Congress approved legislation formally establishing the service nationwide and basing it in the GSA.

In 1990, it became a toll-free telephone number and an outside company was contracted to answer the phones.

Nasif says that 1-800-FED-INFO got about 1.1 million calls from citizens seeking information last year. That, combined with Web traffic and e-mails, translates into some significant traffic for her office.

"When you add up all our channels, including the publications and the calls and the e-mails and the websites, last year in 2007, we had 222 million 'touchpoints' in serving the public and answering their questions."

Calls to 1-800-FED-INFO are answered by a contractor, ICT Group, at a call center located in Central Florida.

Natalie Williams is one of the many operators who answers the phone. She says most of the inquiries are from people who need phone numbers for federal agencies.

Although, she says, there are calls that require a little more research.

Williams talked about a caller who said she could not leave the U.S. without a passport, and wanted to apply for citizenship. Williams says it was a long call, but she was able to connect the caller with an immigration officer who could help her out.

Nasif says natural disasters, such as a hurricane, can often result in a spike in the number of calls to 1-800-FED-INFO.

During Katrina, for example, ICT operator Amy Kessell dealt with a call she will never forget.

"We received a call from a woman who was stuck in her attic -- and the water was slowly rising. She had two small children with her and she was unable to get through to her local law enforcement," Kessell explains.

Kessell says she stayed on the phone with the woman and finally reached local first responders in the woman's community. Asked if her actions saved the lives of the woman and her children, Kessel says to this day, she does not know their fate, since most people who call 1-800-FED-INFO never call back to disuss their encounter with the information line.

Nasif says the entire budget for the Office of Citizen Services comes to about $15 million annually, including the website, phone line publications, and e-mail. She says they're expanding their reach with some familiar Internet tools.

"At a time when we were getting a lot of calls from veterans, many of them went to www.usa.gov and signed up to have an e-mail sent to them whenever content about veterans is posted on the Web," she says.

GSA also runs an RSS feed allowing people to sign up to get updated information about their favorite sites. That information can also be sent to a PDA or cellphone.

Nasif adds that there's a blog written by the people who research information for 1-800-FED-INFO.

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On the Web:

• GSA Federal Citizen Information Center
• ICT Group

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