CorpComms Magazine

Any business operating in a competitive field understands the need for strong lines of communication with its customers. It doesn't matter how excellent the service, or how ground-breaking the new product: if these issues cannot be communicated effectively, or the company suffers from a poor brand image, or customers have little understanding of what the firm does, the business will suffer.

Now, however, this message has begun to filter down to less competitive fields, and even those with the most captive of audiences, such as councils, are taking note. With recent disquiet about issues such as rising council tax, refuse collections moving to once a fortnight and over-vigilant parking wardens, councils are finding that the need to communicate well with residents is more imperative than ever, and many are looking for ways to radically improve their communications.

This is not just an exercise in window-dressing. In an extensive study of last year's best value performance indicator (BVPI) statistics collated for every council in England by the Audit Commission, the Local Government Association (LGA) made a startling discovery. Where residents were found to be most satisfied with their councils, they were not necessarily receiving the best services. In fact, the most satisfied residents were those who felt most well-informed by their councils.

'Communication is everything,' says Ben Dudley, project manager for the LGA. 'Council tax rises have nothing to do with satisfaction. The councils that are the best communicators are also the most popular. We found that of the top 10 most popular councils, only half fell in the top 10 for actual provision of services.'

Express yourself
Of course, Dudley is not advocating that councils abandon good services, just that they start to inform residents about them more clearly. The results of the BVPI study merely confirmed what the LGA has suspected for some time. It has been running a reputation campaign since 2005, after research from Ipsos MORI revealed residents respect councils far less than the services they provide.

The campaign was launched in a bid to convince councils of the need to communicate what they do more effectively. Councils that sign up to the drive must undertake to adopt 12 core actions within 12 months. So far, 270 out of 410 councils in England and Wales have joined.

One of the 12 core actions is to display council logos prominently on all services, so people know who is providing the park or swimming pool they are enjoying. 'Too often residents only ever see the council's brand when they receive a council tax bill, or get a parking fine,' explains Dudley, who concedes that attitudes are not changing overnight. 'People are not always making the connection between the good stuff they enjoy and the council. Some heads of environment, and other services, don't want to use the council's logo. The swimming pool refuses because it is competing with the private sector, and people think the council is boring. Well, it will stay that way until we start putting the council's logo on the fun stuff, too.'

It may be a difficult cycle to break, but it is clear that more and more councils are determined to do so. In Tower Hamlets, for example, the council recently launched a poster campaign to encourage people to report antisocial behaviour using adverts featuring real residents. This works particularly well in a situation where a council needs residents to respond.

'During development of the campaign, we conducted research with eight focus groups to find out what kind of imagery local people wanted to see,' says Andy Bamber, head of community safety at Tower Hamlets Council. 'This told us that people wanted to see real people from the borough in real situations, not models in idealised situations.'

Keep it real
Bamber says this approach is also instrumental in changing attitudes within the community, which in turn helps to promote social cohesion, reduce problem behaviour and reduce the burden on the council - a clear economic benefit of good communicating, if ever there was one.

'Part of the aim of using young people was to show they can be victims of antisocial behaviour, too, as they are often perceived to be the main perpetrators,' explains Bamber. 'This kind of dialogue, where we encourage residents to report antisocial behaviour to us and reassure them that we are responding to their reports, is vital to enable us to work together to fight antisocial behaviour.'

While the upside of better dialogue between councils and residents is clear, the best method of achieving it is less so. One problem is targeting - and this is a particular issue for councils that have to cater to many different groups.

'Local government communications have always been a tough call because most issues don't affect most people,' explains Alex Aiken, head of communications at Westminster City Council. 'For instance, social care is a huge area but most people won't ever use it. All most people see is their council tax bill, and they take a view on whether it is value for money by looking at the state of their street.'

To compound this, it is clear that residents are becoming harder to reach. 'The audience is getting tougher to reach because of the volume of messages being received,' Aiken points out. 'People are busier. They aren't sitting there waiting for the council newsletter to drop through the letter box.'

Meanwhile, as some communities become more marginalised within larger boroughs, and others are highly transient, councils have found themselves struggling to communicate in the right way with the right groups.

'We have an awful lot of hard-to-reach groups in the borough and, traditionally, councils have found it hard to get information across,' says Helen Murphy, communications and marketing officer at Allerdale Borough Council. 'People think they know what the council does - they know we empty the bins, for example - but they don't necessarily know we manage the cemeteries, or run the leisure centres.'

Hit the target
Lisa Stroulger, head of communications and customer care at Brentwood Council in Essex, says a large number of residents in the borough live there because it is well-placed for commuting into London. This makes communication difficult because large swathes of the population simply aren't there during the week.

Both Allerdale and Brentwood are, therefore, focusing efforts on targeting audiences more effectively. Previously in Allerdale, the primary communications tool was the residents' quarterly magazine, into which council departments would fight to get information because there was no other outlet. The aim now, however, is to make communications more integrated.

'We are doing much more advertising on billboards and buses,' says Murphy. 'Our communications are becoming more targeted; we have been breaking down the public into groups. We had a recent campaign, for example, to increase the use of our website, trying to get people to do such things as use online forms.'

Allerdale is also investing in research prior to the launch and after the completion of campaigns to ensure they hit their targets. 'For example, we used focus groups before starting on our annual report last year, to find out what they wanted in it,' says Murphy. 'They decided it should be in colour and feature charts and pictures. And we evaluated it afterwards, using a survey that we included in the report and feedback from the focus groups.'

Brentwood, which has traditionally used a residents' panel to poll the community, has found that investing time in face-to-face communications with all those commuters to support a consultation on highway spending is paying off.

'The panel is obviously made up of people with whom we would probably have a dialogue going already,' explains Stroulger. 'It's the commuters who are hard to reach, so we have been conducting surveys on the train platform; we have researchers on the platforms talking to residents face-to-face. We are also targeting gyms, supermarkets, petrol stations and golf clubs in the evenings and at weekends to catch residents in person.'

Spread the word
Stroulger says it is often a case of combining various methods of communication to ensure coverage of several different target groups. 'Another method we have used - traditionally - is the random postal survey of 5 percent of the borough,' she adds. 'We usually get a good response to that, but no single method is enough, so now we are also using an online survey.'

Advertising and direct links back to Stroulger's team also feature in the highway spending consultation. 'The first thing we did was launch an advertising campaign,' she explains. 'We put billboards on the side of our nine dustcarts, used the local papers - which are read by commuters - and used banners and flyers. We have set up an email address for enquiries and direct dial telephone numbers, so callers come straight through to me or a member of the team. This is partly about making ourselves more accessible and we will probably continue in this way from now on.

'We are here to serve the public. We are dealing with council taxpayers' money, so it is our duty to communicate with them. There is definitely more focus on engaging with residents locally than there has been in the past; it has grown over the years. In general, people have higher expectations and are more demanding, as they should be. It is the council's duty to provide the level of service people expect - and it is right and proper that people should have a say.'

Aiken agrees. 'Council services are not like products - there is no choice of provider,' he points out. 'If people are looking at the council and asking, What do I pay for?, we need to be able to tell them. So at least a resident can say, Well, I don't agree with everything you are spending money on, but at least I can see what it is for.'

For this reason, Westminster holds 100 annual meetings with different community groups to explain what it does. 'It is hard work, and it is painstaking,' says Aiken. 'But when we poll stakeholders, we can see that it is effective.'

Accommodate technology
Apart from the rising popularity of e-communications, which most councils are beginning to embrace, some are also looking at mobile marketing. Most recently, Oxfordshire County Council introduced a new text messaging service to issue emergency warnings to residents about events such as floods, train crashes or even terrorist attacks.

Ian Middleton, product specialist at Avanquest, the software provider that supplied the technology, says his company has been inundated with similar requests from councils. 'It has suddenly become very popular - in the past six to eight months there has been a boom in demand for this service,' he says.

Apart from the obvious benefits, such as text messages being cheaper than letters and the fact that you can track whether they have been opened and read - unlike letters - councils are increasingly locking on to new methods of communication that will really reach residents.

Some councils, such as Telford & Wrekin in the West Midlands, are using text messaging to alert parents to truancy, while others use it to inform residents about leisure club facilities or to tell them when an engineer is coming to fix the boiler. Middleton says he is currently advising several local authorities about using text messaging to remind people to put their recycling bins out on time.

Allerdale is another council looking at using text messaging, particularly for its two-way dialogue possibilities. 'We are looking at using mobile marketing for a consultation on how to use our parks,' explains Murphy. 'We want to target young people - and young people use mobiles.'

Whatever the change in attitude, however, councils still have a great deal of work to do to change perceptions among their residents, says Dudley. 'Sadly, for all their successes, councils are still struggling in this regard,' he notes. 'Fewer and fewer people feel well informed by their council: an average of 42 percent in the 2006-2007 BVPI scores, down 9 percent from the last BVPI survey in 2003-2004.'

Councils certainly have a challenge ahead. 'I think their reputations are now more important than they have ever been,' Stroulger points out. 'Expectations are higher. Councils are very aware that it's more important than ever to get residents' support.'

share me: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | Tweet