Back in 2013, Jay Baer, the marketing and customer experience expert, wrote:

“we are surrounded by data, but starved for insights”.

And still now, 12 years later, many organisations are grappling with how to get meaningful insights from the vast amounts of online posts, messages, comments, and stories shared by their communities on a daily basis.

The public sector is simultaneously facing dwindling resources and an increasing volume of online conversation. It’s a massive challenge.

Public sector teams understand that community insights have the power to positively influence their corporate objectives and key outcomes, but sometimes struggle to put this into practice.

When you consider this alongside recent political announcements around local government devolution, NHS England, and the Strategic Defence Review, to name but a few, it’s no wonder that public emotions are running high, and there are lots of opinions and commentary across the media and digital spaces.

It has never been more important to keep tabs on public sentiment and trust levels. However, in a rapidly changing environment, this can feel like an impossible task.

Tools such as Orlo’s Insights offer public sector organisations the ability to extract actionable insights from data, enabling them to make informed decisions and drive meaningful change.

The platform serves up-to-date insights such as emerging trends, key themes, public sentiment, emotion and trust levels as well as potential areas for improvement. It allows users to dive into audience demographics and behaviours across channels to improve messaging and campaign performance.

Teams can back up qualitative findings with quantitative data by identifying and analysing issues related to their organisation, and create tailored reports to focus on the metrics that matter most to their specific objectives.

By understanding their communities’ preferences and challenges through data analysis, organisations can refine their campaigns to better align with their objectives, leading to more effective outcomes.

Insights allows Comms teams to appreciate the nuances of their communities on each channel, understand what’s working (and what isn’t), refine messaging, and see whether campaigns need tweaking to be more effective.

Insights offers a unique opportunity to understand how people feel about specific policies, campaigns, and key issues. Therefore, organisations using it have the opportunity to shape their activities in ways that land better with their audience. Deeper insights could mean healthier, safer, and more supported communities.

Public sector organisations can tap into insights to meet their specific objectives, allowing teams to: 

• Develop an effective prevention-focused strategy by pinpointing emerging trends.
  For example, by tracking the online conversation around mental health services amongst local young adults, a healthcare organisation could develop a campaign tailored exactly to the concerns of this demographic.
• Boost efficiencies and help organisations to prioritise resources based on their communities’ changing needs.
  For example, a council planning a new cycle route could tap into recurring themes and sentiment related to local travel frustrations, green spaces and planning concerns to ensure the best outcome for the project. 
• Make better decisions.
  A train company with an objective to increase summer travel could tap into engagement levels and themes around festivals. These insights would then help them to choose the best channels and messaging for their upcoming campaigns. 

By taking advantage of tools such as Orlo Insights, public sector teams can cut through the noise and transform raw data into actionable intelligence. Insights can provide a valuable overview of the current landscape, and inform current and future comms and marketing strategies and campaigns.

However, we understand that this wealth of data and insights can feel overwhelming to sift through at first. 

We’ve pulled together our three top tips to help public sector comms teams to use insight in the most effective way

Orlo’s top tips

1. Keep it simple

With the huge amount of new data available on a daily basis, it could be all too easy to disappear down a rabbit hole of insights.

We recommended tying your insights directly to corporate objectives or specific key outcomes to avoid data overload.

Insights provides simple graphs and pre-built reports for a quick overview of the most relevant data, but also allows for deeper dives into specific areas when needed.

2. Work with leadership to establish key metrics

It’s important to collaborate with your leadership team on both your overall strategy and how you’re measuring success.

Take the time to discuss with key stakeholders how individual metrics are linked to your organisation’s overall objectives, and the ways in which insights can positively impact decision-making and resource allocation.

How many times have you written a results report that nobody reads? Speak to leaders to find out what they want to know and make that the focus of your reporting, making it adaptable for different leadership audiences. For example, your Communications Director will want different details to the Leader of the Council.

Also, be wary of ‘vanity metrics’. This applies equally to comms teams and your organisation’s stakeholders, who may not be as well-versed in social media metrics and what they really mean.

Ideally, you should always return to this question: is this going to help us move the needle in terms of driving key outcomes or meeting objectives? If the answer is “no”, then they’re not worth tracking.

3. Let AI do the legwork

AI isn’t the right tool for every task, but one thing’s for sure – it excels at processing data super quickly. Without getting too technical, the AI used in Orlo Insights can analyse data, identify trends, detect patterns, make relevant links, and suggestions and predict what might happen next, all in the space of a few seconds.

Any public sector organisations not using AI for social media data analysis are missing a trick that will save time and money in the long run.

Put simply, insight can bridge the gap between objectives and outcomes. By grounding strategies in what we know about the communities we serve, you can craft campaigns that are relevant and drive measurable impact.

Applying insight to your communications and marketing activity means that audiences will feel understood and respected, and more likely to trust your organisation and act on your messages.

Tapping into real-time insight ensures that every decision is informed, agile, and purpose-led. Orlo Insights is an indispensable tool for helping public sector organisations to make a real difference to citizens and communities.