Orlo’s Community Insights Series: a recap

We’ve been very busy here at Orlo HQ, working on not one… not two… but three (!!!) webinars for you as part of our Community Insights series. In case you missed them, we were exploring the key theme of listening to your community. You can watch the webinars on demand here or read on for a whistle stop tour 🚌

BUT before we get into the meat of things, we’d like to remind you of Orlo’s raison d’être. Here at Orlo, we want to create stronger and more resilient communities, and to do this we help organisations to build trust in communities through brilliant conversations. We listen to the voice of our Orlo community, taking feedback from the people we work with to add value into our work – we factor this feedback and value into everything we do. Orlo is built with the public sector in mind which has a strong influence on our journey of development and innovation. We’re all part of the communities that we look after, which is why we’re all so passionate about supporting the UK public sector in their mission towards successful and positive engagement within communities.

As a public sector organisation, how do you discover and make sense of the billion conversations about you, your community, and events that are happening around you? Conversations can be both direct and indirect. It could be between you and another person or group of people, where you know exactly what’s going on as it happens. Or, you could be indirectly involved where there’s people talking about you and you’re totally unaware of it. There could even be some positive (or negative 😢) feedback left in comment form on social media, a review site, or online publication. In the digital world, there’s thousands upon thousands of conversations taking place every single minute, so how do you make sure you’re always on top of things and kept in the loop? (read on and find out!!)

Anyway, we digress. On to the webinar recap 💫

Key takeaways

First things first,  let’s define what a safe community looks like. We turned to the flavour of the month, fountain of all knowledge, ChatGPT to do this for us. ChatGPT gave us a lovely definition and some key characteristics to consider: 

“A safe community is one where residents feel secure in their surroundings and can live without fear of harm or danger. 

• Low crime rate
• Strong law enforcement presence
• Trust and cooperation (high level of trust and cooperation between community members and law enforcement agencies)
• Well maintained infrastructure
• Access to resources (mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and social services. Addressing underlying issues such as poverty, unemployment, and homelessness)
• Community engagement
• Safe public spaces (public spaces such as parks, playgrounds, and recreational areas are safe and well maintained)
• Effective emergency response
• Inclusive and diverse”

Looking at this list, it seems pretty reasonable to us! However, each characteristic in this list is just one part of a bigger picture. You’re only able to control a small portion of that whilst meeting the myriad needs of your communities. We want you to think about how you control these factors to create a well oiled machine of a community. Think about a proactive approach to prevention.

Let’s think about a community that we work with in the south of Wales. There’s roughly about 300,000 people living there. The questions we want you to ask yourselves is, what’s going on in that community? How do people feel about living there? What are the problems they face? How safe and healthy do the citizens actually feel? What changes need to be made to drive prosperity in that particular community?

Of course, these questions aren’t unique to this community or geographical area. Finding out the answers should form a key part of your corporate strategy. Another (really important) thing to consider is the interdependencies between your goals and what’s going on in your local area or the wider world at the moment. 

We’re in the midst of a cost of living crisis – aside from the clear financial impacts that this is having on the general public, what about the mental health side of things? Such as people worrying about how they’re going to afford to live, this consequence gets passed on to the NHS. People defaulting on their mortgages and becoming homeless might increase the level of antisocial behaviour in a community, which then becomes a problem for the local police force. To put this into perspective, especially around healthcare, the average cost per year to achieve good health is £3,800. Whereas the average cost per year to intervene once a health issue has arisen is £13,500, which is quite a stark difference. This increased level of cost for intervention, rather than prevention, means you’ll have less budget for spending and investing in other areas, and could possibly spread to the wider economy rather than just being a local issue.

If we were able to use foresight and prevent these things from happening, surely this is a huge benefit for your local strategies and also your budgets? That said, in order to take the appropriate action, you need to really understand the nuances of your community and identify the root cause for these issues.

Key takeaways

Naturally, making decisions is an important part of all of our roles and daily lives, and a recurring theme we’re seeing amongst our customers is how to know whether we’re making the right decisions. As public sector organisations, a critical component of your decision making process will be the (anticipated) public reception to the outcomes. You want to drive positive change in your communities, and doing this starts with being open and honest, successfully building trust in your capabilities.

Building trust may not be the easiest of things to do as trust isn’t tangible in the traditional sense; it’s a belief. Here at Orlo, we define trust using three specific parameters set out by Harvard Business School: 

• Authenticity: when people believe they are interacting with the real you
• Logic: when people have faith in your judgement and competence
• Empathy: when people feel that you care about them

Authenticity can be shaped through the type and messages of content you’re pushing out to your audiences, but to improve both the logic and empathy aspects of trust, you need to genuinely understand the needs of your community. Logic is borne from you making the right decisions and demonstrating your integrity to follow through on your promises, and empathy through responding to issues and priorities – solving them where possible. Once you achieve this level of understanding, you can then better shape your strategies and policies to engage your communities and their subsets, make a difference and really deliver on your experience.

A quick way of gathering direct feedback is through your teams that are on the frontline – your comms and customer service teams. Information and intelligence that your comms and CS teams are working with needs to be distributed along the chain of command, across your organisation, so that your communities are the ones shaping your agenda. A bottom up approach demonstrates to your communities that they’re being listened to. Instil data-driven decision making within your organisation to improve your overall efficiency. 

By adapting a bottom up approach, and ensuring that multiple stakeholders across the organisation are aware of the feedback and input that you’re receiving, you demonstrate to the top table why comms is critical to your organisation and its mission. By showcasing the successes you’ve had in listening and responding to your community, your annual strategy should be more robust and clearer from the outset.

A great example of this is from an NHS Trust that we work with. This Trust works in a very diverse community and consulted their social media following, asking for feedback on how to improve the service they’re currently providing. The Trust received feedback from the Muslim community, requesting for signs in waiting areas that point to Mecca to be implemented. This may be a small change for some people, but the Trust successfully demonstrated that they listen to feedback and show their community that they care. These small changes can make a big difference to the experience of communities – and the feedback wouldn’t have been discovered without the level of insight provided by social media and tooling.

Many people don’t feel that they’re involved in council decision making, or they have the voice to be involved should they want to. To encourage engagement in your community, consider signposting your audience to the right areas to get them involved, use social media channels to encourage engagement, introduce a newsletter (email or physical) to keep people updated on current and future initiatives. Humanising your brand is really important so that people don’t feel like they’re dealing with a faceless organisation – benefitting the ‘authenticity’ component of trust. You need to start using all of your channels effectively, finding the best way to support decision making and policy change in your organisation, and ensuring that your campaigns are really hitting the mark.

Key takeaways

Having both the time and the tools at your disposal to understand the voice of your community effectively is where the challenge usually arises. Occasionally technology and tools can be a hindrance if not used correctly, so in this part of the series we’d like to explore how technology can help engage with citizens in a much more powerful way and add value to our communities going forwards. 

Firstly, something to consider is the level of data exposure in our daily lives. Research has shown that the average human processes 74GB of data every day. That’s the equivalent of watching 16 films (!!). You need to be able to cut through the noise and correctly identify what information is relevant to you for you to retain it. 

Let’s apply that same logic to social media. Social media holds a lot of data, about who we are as people, our likes and dislikes, our views and opinions. Social media gives you a quick and easy way of getting in touch with your local community, through updates and direct contact. Cut through the noise and find what’s important to your organisation, critical feedback you weren’t aware of, and use this to inform your comms strategy and beyond.

Understanding the voice of your community is sadly not a straightforward task as the traditional methods of research, namely surveys, only capture a fraction of the feelings amongst your citizens and service users. As not everybody responds to surveys, you’re only really hearing the voices of a small minority of your community, not forgetting that their views and opinions may have changed by the time you’ve processed the data. Communities have high expectations and hope for positive change in the future – how can you be sure you’re accurately representing your community, actioning their wants and needs, if you’re only receiving feedback from such a small sample?

Occasionally there’s a disconnect between corporate pillars and comms plans, as each set of stakeholders will have access to different data. This is even more evident when you factor in that the world of marketing and comms is always changing – so your strategies and plans may need to be more adaptable than initially thought. That said, it’s not always easy to balance incoming and last minute requests from other departments whilst maintaining your efficiency.

Let’s put this into context. Mental health is a priority concern for a lot of councils at the moment, especially with the ongoing cost of living crisis. As a comms team, if you know there’s trending topics or conversations going on around mental health, that are potentially linked to the cost of living crisis, you could actively seek these out and try to be proactive, working ahead of the curve. You could then amend your comms strategy to include relevant information that will add value to those conversations.

Being proactive with your messaging really drives success for your organisation. If you have accurately done your research into your campaign or audience, and you know something to be taking place in due course, by weaving in these signposts and sharing relevant information ahead of time, you then alleviate pressure in another area – such as inbound calls to your service desk. Aligning your comms strategy with other departments makes a remarkable difference and improves the effectiveness of your activities. Showcasing these successes to stakeholders supports alignment with your corporate strategy and goals.

From conversations with over 300 public sector customers, we noticed a common theme emerging. One of the biggest challenges that any organisation faces is getting the data they need to answer strategic questions or make the difficult decisions they need to on a daily basis. And, of course, decisions must (preferably) be based on fact rather than gut feeling – even when our gut feeling is correct.

To truly understand someone or something, to really get what they want and what they expect from you, you need to speak with them, invest your time into getting to know their concerns, priorities, passions… Everybody is unique and not receptive to the same message, we each hold different opinions and views on initiatives or goings on in the world. 

To fully serve the public, you need to know that you’re effectively responding to your communities, their needs, their questions, their likes and dislikes, to really foster those positive feelings of community engagement. Going back to a point we made earlier about conversations being both direct and indirect, you’re already sat on a wealth of information through direct contact on social media with your citizens (e.g., direct messages, comments on posts, tagged mentions), where there is certainly going to be data that will enrich your social strategy. 

Using Orlo Insights, you can look at this data, analyse it, automatically surface any emerging trends and themes in there… Ascertain how your audience truly feels about you from this direct contact. Go beyond the data you’ve already collected and delve into indirect conversations and communications, too. Look beyond social media, external blogs, forums, review sites, publications behind paywalls – there are over 2.5 million different sources out there ready to be scoured! Find out whether you’re trusted by the general public and identify themes and trends in all types of conversations.

Data-driven decisions should, and hopefully do, form a critical part of your social media strategy. When you’re dealing with time and budget constraints, you need to know that the decisions you’re making in relation to campaigns and activities are the right ones.

Use Insights data to advise and shape policy changes, hone your strategy or tactics, guide appropriate action, correct misinformation, and achieve your goals. This could just be in terms of content that you’re putting out to your audiences, or to form your future campaigns and initiatives based on the feedback you’re getting from your local communities. Use the Insights Trust Indicator, formulated using the Harvard Business School definition of trust, to know where you stand with your community and how your decisions are being received. 

Once you know your communities better, and their feelings about you as an organisation, you’ll be able to tailor your messaging and campaigns to meet their expectations. Or even create initiatives and actions based on the feedback you’re seeing and receiving. Better yet, you can get immediate gratification on your performance by scanning the thousands of conversations out there, and optimise your campaigns as required without delay.

Orlo Insights harnesses the power of AI, social listening, and media monitoring to really understand the voice of your citizens, helping you to take the right actions with more impact.