Customer Stories
Wakefield Council boosts trust by 30% with Orlo Insights
Wakefield Council, an Orlo customer since 2022, serves a resident population of over 353,000 people and is committed to building a fairer future for the people it serves.
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With additional strains put on Wakefield Council from rising inflation and the cost of living crisis, its 2024 corporate plan is focused on building a fairer future for the people it serves. This is broken down into 6 key objectives:
- Places to be proud of
- An economy that works for everyone
- Better health and lives
- Thriving children and families
- A greener Wakefield District
- Our future Council
These objectives link to critical ambitions including reducing health inequalities, a new transport strategy and increasing the number of local people into apprenticeships. Having a community that not only trusts its local government but is also engaged with the key topics and projects is vital.
Building community engagement
In 2021 Wakefield’s reputation tracker data showed that only 31% of citizens felt that their views were being taken into account when making decisions, something that the team were keen to fix. Wakefield Council were managing and monitoring all of their social channels natively and was unable to listen across their social channels at all. This meant that although they were posting and able to achieve some engagement, their approach to socials was scattered and based on best guesses of what their audience’s interests and values were. The Comms team and the CS team were unable to collaborate and responses to inbound messages were very sporadic. Most importantly, this led to a lack of clear data and the ability to analyse what was working and why their community were contacting them. The team were swept up in the day-to-day reactive management of socials rather than being proactive and strategic. With such important objectives to achieve, having a clear channel for listening to and communicating with their community was key.
“Orlo was that starting point for us to get some building blocks in place so we could really get to know what each platform does, how it operates and what our audiences want to see from us.”
Laura Hogan | Social and Digital Communications Manager
From broadcast to engagement
After implementing Orlo’s Social Media Management platform, the first step on their journey to better understanding their audience was an in-depth social audit across their corporate social accounts as well as 93 Council service-led accounts. The team worked with their Orlo Customer Success Manager to develop a framework of frequent auditing and used Orlo to help them build a picture of each channel’s purpose and audience.
They implemented Social Listening across their social channels and their Inbox and set up streams that would enable them to listen around the topics of their 6 key objectives.
The team now had access to a full analytics suite and was able to tag inbound messages, run reports on everything from engagement levels to response times and build tailored dashboards showing them what their community were talking about and how much they trusted the council.
This led them to establish a user-first approach with the data that Orlo provided being pivotal with demographic data on gender, age and location allowing them to create a clear user persona, based on their most active followers.
The results
As a result of them working more efficiently, the team’s working relationships with service leaders have greatly improved. They’re now more aligned on strategic campaigns – knowing where to find the relevant audience. Orlo allows the team to have a bird’s eye view of top-performing posts and account performance, measured against their strategy metrics and corporate objectives.
The team is now confident that their social approach offers a consistent tone of voice and aligns directly with the Council’s six key objectives. And it’s not just internally that confidence has grown – that of their audience has too. Using Orlo Insights, Wakefield has been able to track trust in the Council, over time, as they have started to implement this new strategy. The Council’s trust score increased from 46.55% to 76.82% between March 2023 and June 2024, showing the impact their strategy changes have had amongst residents who now see the Council as a more verified and trusted source of information.
This positive swing in trust has continued with the onboarding of the Council’s Customer Service Team onto Orlo. Before the CS Team began using Orlo in December 2023, the main emotions measured were confusion and curiosity for inbound comments and direct messages. With Orlo in place, this has changed to be emotions around gratitude and curiosity with a trust score of over 88% as the two teams now work in harmony to improve citizen experience.
Their social strategy continues to deliver with the Council experiencing a 1.14% engagement rate on Facebook, an engagement rate of 2.36% on LinkedIn and TikTok views reaching 26.4K in July 2024.
“It’s been great working with Laura and the team on this project. The team have been laser-focused on achieving their goals and now have the data they need to help them do that.”
Rebecca Price | Customer Success Manager | Orlo
Trust
30%
increase in trust score
(March 2023 – June 2024)
Trust
88%
trust score since adding Customer Service Team to Orlo
Engagement
1.93%
post engagement when adding links using Orlo’s First Comment feature
Through the improvements we’ve made so far, our trust indicator score has increased by over 30% showing that our new ways of working as a team is having the desired impact for our users who see us as more of a verified and trusting source of information on social media.
Laura Hogan
Social and Digital Communications Manager
Orlo Insights has been instrumental for us. Alongside the preset reports for brand, demographic, trend and experience, we have worked closely with our Customer Success Manager to create bespoke reports, tailored to our needs.
Laura Hogan
Social and Digital Communications Manager
