We're building it, but will they come? With barely 15 months to go before all public services are due to be available electronically, the government is turning some attention to persuading people to use them.

This week, a £2.5m national project gets underway to investigate ways that local authorities can market their e-services. Meanwhile, central government agencies have been set a deadline of December to draw up strategies to increase the take-up of online government.

Britons seem more reluctant than other nationalities to deal with government online. Nearly three quarters of American internet users say they contacted government sites in 2003; the most optimistic estimate is that about half of British internet users do.

Partly, the government has itself to blame. Its original target was for services to be available online, regardless of whether anyone used them. Some services, such as online reporting of minor crimes at www.police.uk are not widely publicised for political reasons. All councils have websites, but few publicise URLs.

Attitudes are now changing, with central and local organisations alike being told to use e-services to cut costs. This won't happen unless enough people use them.

The first national effort to promote take-up, a project called e-Citizen, was launched last week. It is the final rung of a national programme organised by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, to persuade local authorities to go online. The department says that e-Citizen is about "embedding e-government within the lexicon of mainstream local service delivery". In plain English, this means making e-government a normal part of council activities.

Norman Mellor, head of communications and research at Norwich city council, which is leading the project, says the first stage is to find out what authorities are already doing to publicise services. "When we tried to get this information, we found it didn't exist."

The project has commissioned Mori researchers to contact all of England's 355 local authorities this month to find out what e-services they offer, what sort of "customers" they are aiming them at, and what, if anything, they are doing to promote e-services. Mori will also research how private firms and voluntary groups market their websites.

"We will also carry out research to find out what people think about e-government; what real people want."

Results of the research will appear on the project website www. e-citizen.gov.uk as they come in, Mellor said. He plans to have the final research findings by the end of next month. "That will give us a definitive picture, together with a lot of information about what citizens want from their local authorities and some examples of good practice."

Early next year, if all goes well, the 20 most promising ideas will be tested in authorities taking part in the project. "What we want to show is that if you have a research-based approach and apply good practice, you will get good take-up. It may be stating the obvious, but at the moment we don't know that."

The project faces several obstacles. One is time. Its funding runs out in April, by which time most local authorities will already have allocated their last slices of e-government funding. It may also run into the phenomenon of e-government fatigue - council chief executives have been bombarded with requests from central government for information about their e-programmes.

However, the biggest obstacle may be the poor public perception of local e-government. According to a survey published last week by an IT firm Transversal, three-quarters of respondents said they had not noticed the impact of e-government investments.

It found that communication by phone is still the favourite medium for 58% of respondents, with 32% opting to use email or the web. Gerard Buckley, the firm's chief executive said: "The public clearly hasn't noticed any improvement in public sector websites. While significant public funds have been ploughed in to content management and CRM (customer relationship management) systems, there are few public sector websites that allow us to ask a question and receive an intelligent answer in return."

With e-government seen as the key to reforming public service, the pressure to promote e-channels is likely to increase. Last month, the Gershon review of public service efficiency called on the Treasury and the new e-Government Unit to "issue a benchmark standard for high quality strategies to ensure new electronic services and channels get high levels of take-up". Departments have until December to provide such take-up strategies. The review also comes close to calling for e-channels to be made compulsory for certain types of users. The most likely candidates are VAT returns for business, and Companies House registrations.

Making e-government compulsory for citizens is probably a step too far, for the moment. However, policy makers may envy the success of Travis County, Texas. It has persuaded 85% of people summoned for jury service to reply online - mainly because the alternative is to spend several hours queuing at a courthouse.