
Seamless citizen engagement – naturally
A lesson in engaging new audiences, using new channels.

As the largest Welsh Government sponsored body, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) deals with everything from flooding to forestry, conservation to farming.
Keeping the public informed is a key priority for them and social media has made them accessible to new audiences, many of whom may not have chosen to engage with them via more traditional channels. It allows NRW to hear new voices, understand how their work is impacting communities and learn what people want to see from the organisation.
It was when Storm Dennis hit South Wales in early 2020 that their social media channels really came into their own. Social proved the quickest way to communicate directly with affected communities and share important information – providing real-time updates about the latest flood warnings, as well as demonstrating the efforts of their teams in emergency response.
As a comms team dealing with huge volumes of both inbound and outbound messages with Orlo’s scheduling calendar enabling them to better prepare and plan their content to suit. Orlo’s Inbox feature has also proven invaluable, allowing the Customer Hub team to view and manage enquiries from one central place and put in place their own tagging system, all while keeping a close eye on sentiment and response times.
42%
Increase in followers during Storm Dennis
5.7 million
Reach across Twitter and Facebook
75%
Positive or neutral sentiment
As a fair-sized comms team with a lot of traffic to coordinate, we get loads of value out of the ability to create and track campaigns, projects and incidents, and spend a lot of time taking a deep dive into our analytics to review our efforts and ensure our communications are as effective as they can be.
Joanne Westlake
Senior Communications Officer
We went down to phone lines being open for emergencies only but we quickly realised that we needed another channel for customers to reach us on. We went from having nothing on the website for live chat, to having a fully embedded system.”
Jasmine Dudgon
Communications Specialist