As of today there are 128,040 people who have registered an e-mail account at the Estonian online state portal eesti.ee. Approximately half of them, 55,780, have subscribed to various e-notifications.
During the past 6 weeks another 4,669 users have forwarded their eesti.ee e-mail address to another account, and 1,632 persons have signed up for notifications.
The e-mail address provided by the Republic of Estonia in the form of [email protected] is free of charge to everyone who carries the Estonian ID-card. It takes only a couple of minutes to activate the account at the online state portal. All e-mails sent to the virtual @eesti.ee address must be forwarded to one´s real e-mail account. The @eesti.ee address is the official communication channel between the government and its citizens, and enables various state agencies to contact people electronically when necessary.
In addition to a neutral address that is easy to remember, the portal enables people to subscribe to various practical electronic notifications. For example, many people tend to forget to renew their driving licenses or take their vehicles for inspection. In legal terms, driving with an expired license is equivalent to having no license at all and the penalty for this infringement is up to 300 euros. The right to drive is also suspended upon the expiry of the health certificate. People who have activated their eesti.ee accounts and subscribed to relevant notifications receive reminders via e-mail or SMS text message form the Estonian Road Administration 30 days prior to the expiry of their license.
Hopefully a new feature developed by the Police and Border Guard Board will be added soon to the state portal. One that reminds people about impending expiry of their ID-card or passport.
Form April to June the Estonian Information System´s Authority (RIA) conducted an awareness campaign, reminding people of services provided by eesti.ee, and inviting them to use more than 200 services provided by the portal.
In the framework of this campaign RIA developed an exciting and informative feature, an interactive environment, where people could see a quick overview of all the information that can be found about them in government databases. This feature called Ervinal, at ervinal.eesti.ee, has been accessed by 19,000 unique users from 72 countries.
“The objective of eesti.ee is to facilitate communication between the government and the citizenry. The feedback we have received from Ervinal will be used to further develop the state portal,” comments Tiina Rekand, editor of the portal.
The Estonian online state portal eesti.ee was established in 2007 as a result of merging the Information Portal and the Citizen´s Portal. There were 218,000 unique visits during the first year of operation, as compared to 3,4 million visits in 2011.
The most frequently used services of the state portal are the submission of notices of residence and applications for parental benefits, checking one´s data from national registers, benefits for incapacity to work, and applying for the European Health Insurance Card.
The state portal awareness campaign was organised in the framework of EU structural funds programme „Raising Public Awareness about the Information Society“, and financed by the European Regional Development Fund.
