What social cohesion is, why it matters, and how public sector comms can build it

Think back over the last year or two. Between the cost of living crisis, the lingering aftershocks of public health emergencies, and the deeply unsettling civil unrest we saw in pockets across the UK, your communities have been through the mill. And, if you work anywhere in public sector comms or social media, you’ve likely noticed a shifting tide. The atmosphere on social media can feel a bit more combative, mistrust is easily sparked and mis/disinformation is soaring.

In this landscape, the phrases “social cohesion” and “community cohesion” have become something that’s being talked about more and more and is turning into an urgent operational objective. But what does it actually mean for those of you tasked with keeping the public informed, safe, and connected?

Let’s break down what social cohesion looks like in practice, why it is the glue holding public services together, and how communications teams can proactively foster it.

At its heart, social cohesion is about belonging. It’s the invisible glue that holds a community together. A cohesive society is one where citizens, regardless of their background, age, ethnicity, or economic status, feel a sense of shared identity, mutual trust, and equal opportunity.

In local government, it’s the difference between a geographical borough where people happen to live next to each other, and a genuine neighbourhood where people look out for one another. You’ll see the same pattern in policing, health and social housing too.

For the police, cohesion is the transition from tense, reactive policing to a community where residents actively collaborate with local officers because they feel safe and heard. In the NHS, it’s where there’s an empowered network of neighbours who support each other’s wellbeing and tackle health inequalities together. In social housing, it’s what turns a concrete block of flats into a supportive, tight-knit community where tenants look out for their neighbours’ kids and check in on elderly residents.

When cohesion breaks down, organisations working in and with communities are left dealing with misinformation, handling spikes in complaints, and managing community tensions. 

This is why staying ahead of community tension before it becomes a crisis is so critical. To do this, comms teams must learn to distinguish between genuine community tension and just a few loud voices dominating the comments section. Many councils are now actively taking advice from the police on what the actual tension is on the ground, utilising a collaborative, multi-agency approach to keep a pulse on local safety. 

Proactively investing in cohesion is an essential preventative strategy. When a community trusts its local institutions and its neighbours, the ripple effects are felt everywhere:

• It saves money: We know that public sector budgets are stretched to the absolute limit. On the flip side, cohesive communities naturally look out for one another, reducing the pressure on social care, reducing antisocial behaviour costs, and easing the burden on frontline NHS services.
• It makes public consultations easier: When you need to make big changes, whether that’s introducing a new clean air zone, building new social housing, or restructuring local services, a cohesive community is more likely to engage constructively. Instead of defensive public meetings, you get genuine, collaborative consultation.
• It makes it easier to deal with misinformation: In today’s digital age, rumours spread like wildfire. But when a community has strong social ties and a solid relationship with public bodies, they are far less likely to buy into toxic narratives or fake news online. Trust acts as a natural vaccine against misinformation.

As communications professionals, you are the bridge between the institution and the individual. You have the power to shape the narrative. Here are some practical ways your team can start becoming proactive social cohesion builders.

Ditch the faceless, corporate tone of voice

When tensions are high, residents don’t want to be quoted legal frameworks or rigid policy documents. Whether you’re dealing with highly charged hyper-local issues (like the recent debates around community identity) or a controversial planning decision, honesty is always the best policy. Empathise with residents’ concerns. Use plain, warm UK English. Acknowledging that people care deeply about their area builds an immediate bridge of trust.

This trust also extends to how we manage our digital spaces when things get heated. It can be incredibly tempting to turn off comments to protect staff and protect our reputation, but doing so heavily erodes trust and it makes residents think we’re simply not listening.

Instead, we need to understand the nuance of comment moderation. Leaving comments on is vital, but you also need to be able to protect your teams at the same time. Hiding comments may be an option, or investing in a tool that can reply to comments using human in the loop AI might be an alternative.

Tap into community influencers

Every area has its prominent voices; the local Facebook group admin, the faith leader, the community cafe owner, or the local sports coach. People are naturally inclined to trust individuals they know rather than a corporate logo. Comms teams should use digital data to identify these key voices, meet them where they are (yes, even over a face-to-face cup of coffee), and co-create content with them.

A brilliant example of this was shared at LGComms Academy by Luton Borough Council. They were facing a far right rhetoric online that didn’t reflect their diverse, proud community, so instead of just launching a standard corporate PR campaign, they co-created the ‘We Are Luton’ campaign with the community, letting residents reclaim their own story.

To make it feel entirely organic, they soft launched using the personal social platforms of local journalist and historian Taj Ali, before a highly engaged cohort of partners and community influencers (including the Luton Sikh Soup Kitchen, St Joseph’s Scout Group, and local youth faith projects) released their own authentic videos using the #WeAreLuton hashtag. By stepping back and letting real, organic voices lead, the campaign generated nearly 280,000 views and dozens of pieces of community led content, completely bypassing the “faceless council” stigma and keeping the town united.

For more advice on co-creation, download our guide for free. 

Close the loop (you said, we did)

There is nothing more damaging to social cohesion than a public consultation that feels like a tick box exercise. If you ask the community for their input, you must show them the results of their engagement. Even if you can’t deliver exactly what a group wanted due to budget constraints, explaining why, builds respect. Closing the loop proves to residents that they have been heard, transforming frustration into collaboration.

However, closing the loop isn’t just about sending an automated email follow up or a dry policy update, it’s about validating a community’s lived experiences.

A spectacular example of this comes from the communications team at the London Borough of Waltham Forest. As a recognised Borough of Sanctuary, they didn’t just state their values on a corporate PDF and leave it at that, they brought them to life through their ‘Stories of Sanctuary’ campaign, which actively amplified the voices of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers through sensitive, authentic video, audio, and photography.

By focusing on everyday, shared human experiences, like football, food, family, and friendship, the campaign humanised a highly marginalised community, successfully challenged hostile media narratives and drove real community action, including a notable surge in volunteer applications for local drop-in support centres and housing host charities.

For inspiration on who is doing this well, have a ready of our customer story from Basildon Borough Council.

Time for a quick reality check. If you’re reading this as an overworked comms professional, or a manager spinning far too many plates at once, you might be thinking “this sounds great in an ideal world, but I barely have time to get through the day to day, let alone sit down with some local community influencers, or track social cohesion across social media.”

It’s a completely fair point, however it’s worth remembering that social cohesion is something that’s built over time, and you don’t have to do it all yourself. Here are some ways you could lean on the rest of the business:

• Frontline staff: Your housing officers, ticket inspectors, youth workers, and community hub staff are already out there every single day. They already know the cafe owners, the faith leaders, and the local characters. Ask them for an introduction.
• Create strong bonds via internal good news stories: As Harshil Shah from the Waltham Forest campaign highlighted, the key is forging strong internal bonds with these resident-facing teams. By educating internal colleagues on what a “good news story” or a “community influencer” looks like, they become your eyes and ears on the ground. They can handle the face to face relationship building and feed the stories or connections back to you.
• Work smarter, not harder: You don’t need a network of hundreds. Start small by identifying just two or three key strategic partners who hold the keys to wider networks and let them do the heaving lifting for you.

Building social cohesion requires you to have your finger firmly on the pulse of your community. You can’t build trust if you don’t know what’s causing friction. That is exactly where Orlo comes in. Built specifically for the public sector, Orlo gives comms teams the tools they need to listen, engage, and connect.

Social Listening and Media Monitoring: 

Tensions rarely boil over out of nowhere, they simmer on social media first. Orlo’s social listening capabilities allow you to track sentiment, monitor hyper-local keywords, and spot misinformation early. You can even stay ahead of community tension before it becomes a crisis by setting up volume and keyword based tension alerts. 

Whether it is tracking extremism, protest language, perceived inaction, or local flashpoints, you will receive notifications when conversation volumes spike. 

If a rumour starts spreading about a local development or a service change, you can jump in with real-time, transparent facts before the narrative escalates. Listening and Media Monitoring is also useful for more positive content as it enables your team to be notified when something positive within the community happens that you can reshare and amplify to your own channels.

Social Media Management: 

To position your organisation as the single version of truth, you have to get ahead of the narrative. Orlo allows you to coordinate and publish proactive, highly relevant communications across multiple channels simultaneously. By pushing out accurate, human updates the moment a situation develops, you let the community know you are actively “on it”.

A unified digital Inbox: 

To build trust, you need to be responsive. When citizens reach out on their digital channel of choice, they expect a timely response. Orlo brings all these conversations into a single, manageable inbox, ensuring your team never misses an opportunity to have a meaningful, two-way dialogue with a resident. 

To keep your workflow clean, Orlo also allows you to automatically tag and categorise inbound conversations so you can easily separate day to day service complaints from critical community tension signals.

AI-powered Insights, Trust Indicator and Analytics: 

One of the biggest hurdles for public sector comms teams proving with real, tangible evidence that community engagement is working to create social cohesion. How do you measure “belonging”?

Orlo’s Insights can help with this. By monitoring changes in sentiment, emotion engagement rates, and shifts in digital behaviour over time, you can assign a measurable “Trust Score” to your engagement. Orlo gives you the hard reporting data you need to show that your social cohesion work is working and breaking down those silos.