The Health Research Authority makes it easy to do research that people can trust. The regulator, an NHS organisation, recently closed its X account. Head of Communications Eve Hart wrote an update for colleagues on what this decision means for the HRA, and has agreed to share it here to support comms colleagues still deciding what to do with the accounts that they manage.
If you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t be doing it.
The HRA’s communications team is part of the Government Communications Service (GCS), and its operating model for communications is clear that data and evaluation should inform our practice.
Since the social media platform Twitter was bought by billionaire Elon Musk and rebranded X, this has been a challenge. Where once the HRA’s highest performing social media account had a trusted blue tick and was rich with engagement, in the last year the site has changed beyond all recognition. And our analytics have gone. Without paying £1,000/month (which is greater than the cost of keeping our whole corporate website up and running!) it’s no longer possible to measure the impact of our social media content … what’s worked well, what missed the mark, and what have we learned?
At the end of 2023, confused about what the lack of data meant for @HRA_Latest, I asked my friends. At CommsCamp (a free conference for public sector communications professionals with tiny budgets!) I ran a session consulting with equivalents in other organisations. The consensus was that watchful waiting was the best way forward. Whilst we felt the winds of change, many of our audiences remained on the platform, and they still expected to hear from us.
By mid-2024 things had not improved. Accounts removed from previous iterations of the platform for harassment or discrimination were allowed to return, and the site’s algorithm was changed to push content from organisations like ours down in feeds. If we added a link, our posts would be shown to fewer people. But there were new shoots of hope as alternative platforms started to spring up and grow leaves. Maybe we should move to Mastodon, think about Threads, bring it on Bluesky? We registered our account names, just in case.
We started a social media review, well underway today. This includes an assessment of the range of platforms available to us. Using the HRA’s stakeholder categories and data from Ofcom we’re assessing what the different options would mean. Where do researchers expect us to post if our systems are down? Where does the HRA Community want to see us celebrate the amazing contribution they make to UK research? Where is the patient and public involvement community, we miss their input?
But whilst the starting point had been to use data to drive a decision to finally leave X (or not), this work is now looking forward rather than back, as our corporate profile on the platform was deactivated last week.
The media regulator has criticised social media platforms (especially X) for their role in the racially-aggravated violence which appalled us all earlier this month, and the owner of the platform has himself helped misinformation to spread. X is no longer a safe space for communications colleagues to manage as part of their roles, nor should we direct our stakeholder there for the latest information from the HRA. It’s counter to our values, and the careful work we’ve done to make sure ours is an organisation which people trust, and where they want to work, volunteer, or get involved.
In the coming weeks we’ll be talking to you about your comms plans. If we’re supporting you with a project or piece of work as part of which we were going to use X, we’ll work with you to identify other channels to reach the audiences you want to, and to measure the impact of your work. These are exciting times for team comms as we work to find new ways to achieve our external comms objectives and support the HRA.
Where we can measure it, we’ll be doing it. And we’re going to be proud of it too.
Eve Hart is head of communications at the Health Research Authority.