Moscow Mayor's Office will spend a billion rubles on newsletters

Basically, the budget growth is explained by the increase in the number of messages sent, but also the cost of sending each particular message - it increased by more than 10%, which market participants explain as an increase in audience loyalty to such mailings during the pandemic. SMS in the new contract went up from 1.54 to 1.72 rubles apiece, messages on VKontakte - from 0.37 to 0.42 rubles, in Viber - from 1.29 to 1.45 rubles.

“The Moscow Department of Information Technologies (DIT) plans to spend 1.03 billion rubles on users of Moscow’s mobile services”, the Kommersant newspaper reports with reference to the government procurement website. It is about informing users of the Unified Mobile City of Moscow GIS, which combines mobile applications urban services".

The newsletters will contain information on services and events in the areas of healthcare and housing and communal services, traffic police fines and the status of applications for the provision of public services. The tender for the first government procurement in this area - for the provision of mailing services over a period of ten months worth 608 million rubles was won by IE Telecom, owned by Yegor Samorodov. Reception of applications for the second purchase - for the payment of mailings within four months worth 421.9 million rubles has only just ended.

In December last year, tenders were posted on the government procurement portal to cover the activities of the Moscow authorities, inform citizens about important events, and cover state and city programs of the Russian capital in “loyal” city media. The amount of contracts also reached a similar amount - about 1.1 billion rubles. It is assumed that such public relations should form a “positive face” of the city authorities.

Earlier in October last year, the city’s authorities allocated another 15 billion rubles to the “friendly” media in the budget , while only 14.9 billion rubles were allocated to protect the environment and improve the city’s ecology.