Councils and digital communications

Although digital communication on numerous platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is widespread amongst citizens, come councils seem to struggle to identify and thus to implement a successful digital strategy.

But these innovations enable quicker and more engaging interactions between citizens and the council.

The recently published Public Sector Digital Communications and Social Media survey that benchmarks public sector organisations’ understanding and current trends in digital communication and social media revealed invaluable findings on how public organisations are facing the digital driven society

Social Media

Social Media should be seen as one channel in a communications strategy that covers other digital channels like websites, SEO and mobile content delivery as well as offline tools. The engaging character of social media is seen as an effective way to engage in two-way dialogue in a citizen’s own space and at their convenience. Although quick and instant, councils seem to find managing the resource overhead more problematic. This may explain why most of those surveyed only reported using a few social media channels, although worryingly only 30% reported having social media in their communications strategy.

There is little point in pursuing a weak and unplanned social media activity. Like all activity within an organisation, social media objectives need to be set, a target audience identified and the necessary resources and budget secured.

Most public sector bodies are in fact embracing some social media activity, with social networking (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) having the highest usage at 71% followed by microblogging (e.g. Twitter) with 69% usage. However, only 43% report that they are monitoring the effectiveness of social media engagement. How do the majority, not measuring their social media activity, know if it is meeting its objectives? Social media monitoring may be difficult but it is vital, and there are a range of solutions and training courses on the market to help with this.

Monitoring and measuring the effectiveness of the digital strategy will help councils understanding how users engage with their websites in order to improve customer journeys. High website traffic doesn’t necessarily mean an effective strategy: if citizens are dropping out before completing the tasks and reverting to phone contact then this can be seen as an expensive failure. These failures need to be identified so that they can be remedied. This can only be done with robust analytics and the skills to interpret them.  Above all, having metrics can help prove the success and justify digital marketing.

Creating efficiencies - do it online

It is important to recognise the channel costs of servicing citizens. Other surveys, such as SOCITM’s channel benchmarking survey, have indicated that channel costs are:

•    £8.23 Face-to-face
•    £3.21 Telephone
•    £0.39 Website

Clearly by directing people to self-serve online and ensuring that processes are as easy as possible, can create significant savings for a council receiving hundreds or thousands of contacts every day. These figures can be viewed for those light-touch services such as paying a bill, finding some information like a recycling collection day or submitting an application. For service provision where in-depth human interaction is required, beatbullying published at the Third Sector Digital Communication and Social Media convention provide the costs for 1-2-1 interventions:

•    £600 Face-to-face
•    £250 Telephone
•    £60 Online

Whilst the costs are much higher, there are clear similarities in the savings that can be made. Zipporah has been involved in helping numerous councils, which recognise the efficiency gains that can be made online by improving their operations and services on a digital platform through efficient e-commerce and e-booking solutions. By doing this, website visitors will have a better experience while organisations reduce their costs and improve service delivery.

Delivering services online is the most efficient way of engaging with service users, as acknowledged by 68% of those surveyed by GOSS. Added to this, 76% said they were under pressure to reduce costs. There seems a clear route to resolving the requirement to reduce costs, increase online engagement and making efficiency savings - put a channel shift strategy and budget in place to facilitate the delivery of more services online.