Category Archives: communications

Connecting with Facebook groups to share a Facebook page’s content is transforming the reach and audience of one museum’s online presence Francesca Cox explains.

Like many people working in small museum, somehow I’ve ended up as the ‘social media person’ by default and it has just ended up being added to my growing to-do list. 

I had no real clue what I was doing but threw stuff out there regardless.  Some of it stuck, much of it didn’t.  It felt like an uphill battle that we weren’t winning.

Then came lockdown and we had to close our doors.  It was scary.  What could we offer our public? What could we offer them to let them know we were still there and had something to offer them?  That part of the job that I couldn’t have felt less confident in was suddenly our lifeline.

So I sat at home making content.  Doing step-by-step crafts for families locked inside with little to do using stuff they might have to hand.  It was tough to start with.  We didn’t have that many followers and the Facebook algorithms were a real problem.

The success was encouraging but when I experimented with other types of content that I thought would appeal to our older visitors, our fabulous archive of historic photographs, the result was tumbleweed. 

I was ready to throw in the towel and just accept that there was just no on-line audience for that type of thing.

Then the opportunity came along for some actual training and I grabbed it with both hands.  I had no idea if it would help but figured it was all good experience.  The Essential Comms Skills Booster sessions run by Dan Slee were hugely informative and very enjoyable and it was really interesting to exchange experiences with trained comms people who were struggling with their own social media issues in lockdown. 

But we’ve all been to training sessions where we’ve been fired up in the moment but weeks later it’s all fizzled away.  But some of the ideas were so do-able that I took the plunge and put them into practice. 

For me the hallelujah moment has been his advice to share content to Facebook groups.  I started tentatively at first, sharing the museum’s content with a group I’d long been a member of.  Straight away the results were obvious and the reach went up by 91 per cent.  Buoyed by this, I looked for other groups and picked out a couple that might hit a different target audience and found a couple that were based around sharing photographs of the area. 

I shared some more of our lovely photographs that before had sunk without trace.  The result was quite frankly astonishing.  Not only in the sheer numbers of people that we were reaching but in the reactions.  Hundreds of likes, hundreds of comments – real interactions with the public that museums dream of and a dramatic increase in followers 

People were sharing their stories, catching up with people they’d lost touch with and sharing their own photographs. 

Four posts reached over 42,000 people compared to four similar posts that managed a very dispiriting 1,835 in total – a rise of over 2,000 per cent.

As we come to the end of a full covid year, our total reach is up over 1,000 per cent on the previous year and I couldn’t be more pleased.  This terrible year has counted for something.  I feel so much more confident that the museum has something to build on.   So, does this expert stuff work?  You’re damn right it does.

Francesca Cox is Assistant Curator at Walsall Leather Museum. 

Learn more about the ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER sessions here.

Footballers have been hitting the headlines for a zero tolerance approach to racist abuse.

Swansea City, Birmingham City and Glasgow Rangers have all boycotted social media for a week because of ongoing abuse.

It’s hard to argue against that.

However, in a recent survey of more than 400 public sector communications people I carried out it shows 12 per cent have seen racist abuse.

That’s an increase of half since the first three months of lockdown.

Look at the figure for more general verbal abuse and the figure rises to 19 per cent.

So, can we just boycott social media?

Unlike football clubs, the public sector doesn’t have the luxury of boycotting a platform for a week in the middle of a pandemic. It needs to be where people are so it can talk to people.

But should people just go on regardless?

Of course, not.

Who cares?

We all should care, shouldn’t we?

Well, we should but frankly there’s a load of people who don’rt even know that this is taking place. In very simple terms, if you’re in the trenches answering social media queries every day there’s a good chance you’re getting worn down by it.

If you’re a manager or head of comms, the further you are away from the social media inbox the less idea you have this is going on. There’s a swathe of central government communications people who have literally no idea this is taking place at all.

What can be done?

I’ve blogged before about the need to have a set of social media house rules in plain English that say what you’ll do and what you’ll put up with. Having it spelt out in black and white means you can take action.

I’ve also heard the suggestion that incidents of abuse should be logged as health and safety incidents.

I couldn’t agree more.

The UK Health and Safety Executive classes violence at work as verbal abuse and threats as well as physical attacks. Looking further into it, all workplaces need to be tackling this.

The HSE’s Preventing Workplace Violence and Harassment download sets out the problem well:

Employers are responsible for identifying and managing the risk of
harassment and violence at work. They should provide clear policies
in relation to harassment and violence, detailing their own
responsibilities, as well as those of their workforce, to raise awareness
of related issues among the workforce, and set standards for
workplace behaviour.

But that’s fine in principle. How do you take the first step towards action?

The HSE have some useful advice on this.

Running a poll of employees and then tell people the results is a useful way that line managers can start to discover and recognise the problem.

That’s a useful first step.

How about racist abuse?

The Citizens Advice Bureau has a useful resource that guides you through the problem of racist abuse in the workplace. It also covers abuse around religion.

Employers need to set out what action they’ll take, what support is there and what steps they’ll take if they think the matter is so serious that a criminal case needs to be brought.

Finally, join a union. I’ve been in the NUJ since the mid-1990s.

It’s time that we took this seriously.

Nextdoor is a US platform with 4 million UK users that signs people up to Facebook group-like communities. Join as council, fire or police under a partnership agreement and you can get your messages sent directly to each member. Interested? But how does it look in action? Lucy Salvage posts the same content to Facebook and Nextdoor and measures the impact in a one-off case study in an area that demands further investigation.

When I first heard about NextDoor, I have to admit I was sceptical.

I was not enamoured with the idea of yet another social media platform consuming so much of my time. So I tried to avoid it for as long as I could. I tried to forget it existed. This strategy worked well, until our neighbouring council’s started using it. They liked it. “Damn them!” I thought.

So with a big inhalation of breath, we signed up. It took a while for us to be set up as a local authority profile by NextDoor itself – they are much more hands-on and customer-servicey in this respect than Facebook. We had a contact and they assisted with the set up which included individual log-ins for our team of three.

That done, all was left to do was add a profile picture and then we could start posting. We have decided to use it for important alerts and public notices rather than it become a duplicate Facebook or Twitter; we are just not resourced for the same level of monitoring and engagement unfortunately.

What’s great about NextDoor is the nature of it’s set up. By using postcode data to build “neighbourhoods”, it allows users to easily send target messages to geographical areas – for free.

Despite my initial scepticism, I was quite taken a back by how many “members” there are using NextDoor in our District. 15,219 to be exact. That’s 9.5 per cent of our population compared with only 3.49 per cent of people who follow our Facebook page; and we haven’t even had to work for years to build that audience.

By only our third post we have been able to see the benefits of using NextDoor. A post about fly-tipping has surprisingly received only 1,400 fewer impressions than the same post on our Facebook page. Unfortunately, the analytics are not as detailed, and the only stats available seem to be impressions.

A/B testing data

Wealden District Council Facebook vs NextDoor

*NextDoor is able to give this figure due to sign-up being reliant on postcode data.

What I also like about it, is that there is an option to disable comments on posts. This is really helpful as we intend to primarily use NextDoor as a broadcast platform due to our resource capability.

The Facebook post with 5,396 impressions

The Nextdoor post with 3,996 impressions

As for the fly-tippers, they were identified in a matter of hours, leaving our waste team in awe of the power of socials, and myself convinced that NextDoor might not be that bad a thing afterall.

Lucy Salvage is media and communications officer at Wealden District Council.

It’s a few days after lockdown restrictions have been eased in England and people have taken to the parks in numbers.

They’ve met-up with friends and family and they’ve drunk a few cans and eaten a few barbeques.

The aftermath has been piles of rubbish.

On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Monday morning a guest from a national charity spoke how this scene was ‘unacceptable’ and it got me thinking – yet again – about how we settle for euphemisms.

They are ‘concerned.’

They are ‘worried.’

The action is ‘regrettable.’

Football managers are ‘delighted’.

Strikers are ‘gutted’ to miss the penalty.

In a committee, these words are code that soften the blow of fierce criticism. In public they are dreadful words that pull punches.

When I was a reporter I used to be asked by a news editor what I meant when I wrote a particularly wordy paragraph. When I translated it into plain English I was then asked to write that instead.

It’s long since time we worked out what we actually mean and then write that instead.

There were more than a few who raised an eyebrow to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s claim that people working from home in a pandemic were having ‘days off.’

If you’ve been working in public sector communications since the pandemic started you’ll be especially disapproving and data would support you.

A bumper 78 per cent of people said they were more stressed working since pre-COVID days in the latest tracker survey I ran in January and February.

Often, people will be working from home with a managed return to the office still some distance away.

But what other numbers shine through?

Stress is levelling off. Almost eight out of 10 reported feeling more stress working as public sector communicators than before the start of the first lockdown. That’s the same figure as October.

Mental health is suffering. In the survey, 73 per cent said their mental health had deteriorated since the start of the pandemic – a decline of eight per cent since the question was asked in October.

Isolation is increasing. In the first two months of the year, 55 per cent reported feeling more isolated compared to 34 per cent in the summer.

Physical health is suffering. Restrictions on exercise and team sport were the backdrop to 57 per cent of public sector comms people saying this was their experience – seven per cent worse than the last round of the survey in October.

Verbal and racial abuse is easing but significant. A total of 12 per cent saw racist abuse down by four points while verbal abuse has eased two points to 19 per cent.

A feeling of working for the common good remains. Encouragingly, 76 per cent still feel as though they were working for a higher purpose which is almost unchanged since the summer and autumn surveys.

Feeling part of history remains. In the first weeks of the first lockdown there was a sense of the momentous and this has stayed the course unchanged at 36 per cent.

What do these figures say?

It’s clear that the pandemic has been the opposite of ‘days off’ to public sector communicators near the sharp end. They may not be working directly on COVID wards but they have not had an easy ride.

Less visible than nurses and carers, NHS, local government, central government, police and fire communicators have fought a spare room frontline working in conditions less than ideal.

They deserve credit not being dismissed.

More than 400 people took part in the third round of an online tracker survey of public sector communicators in January and February. Earlier iterations had taken place in June and July and September and October. The next round of polling will take place in April.

When the pandemic forced us to re-think how we do things some people fell into the trap of thinking this is how they’d always be.

Clearly, the argument went, people will see how better new ways are and people won’t want to go back.

I wasn’t one of them.

In 1789, the French revolutionaries were met by counter-revolutionaries who wanted to turn the tide of history back. This is always the case with any social change.

One of the good ideas was using video conferencing like Zoom to run meetings. The step allowed for people to log on at home to follow the proceedings. In the case of Handforth Parish Council it also showed how badly democracy was performing.

More public and more accountability were the spin-offs of Zoom meetings.

The counter-revolution

This sense of progress has come to a halt with a letter from local government minister Luke Hall MP to English councils where he points to updated guidance here that recommends meetings return to in-person delivery.

Rules for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland councils are issued by their home government.

The key passage is here:

A good day for bad councillors

There’s no data to accompany this to suggest the decision will make local government more open and accountable.

Heaven knows if this will bring more people into seeing what their council was doing.

Indeed, it’s hard to see the binning of Zoom and a return to dusty council chambers attended by elderly men and women and one man and a guide dog in the public gallery is a positive step in 2021.

A Zoom meeting with no face-to-face contact is inherently safer than a public meeting even with some space between seats and a bottle of hand gel by the door.

It’s also worth noting that Parliament will continue online meetings until the summer at least.

Mind, it’ll be good for councillors who don’t like transparency and accountability.

History tells us that sensible decisions taken in a crisis won’t mean they stay. If you work in central government you may recall the mid-pandemic request for staff to go to the office to save town and city centres. All of a sudden it was about saving the coffee shops when in reality it was about the big pension funds who have vast assets lying empty.

What’s next?

Of course the office isn’t dead, it’s just waiting for the counter-revolution.

EDIT: Speak of the devil.