Wakefield Council

The challenge:

Like many local authorities across the UK, Wakefield Council and its communities are struggling with the cost of living and rising inflation. In 2024, Wakefield’s corporate objectives therefore focus on building a fairer future for the people it serves. This overarching objective is broken down into 6 key areas:

In order to achieve these objectives and in light of the wider challenges, it was crucial that the people of Wakefield trusted its local government and actively engaged with these topics. However, 2023 data showed that the organisation’s trust indicator score stood at 47%, leaving plenty of room for improvement.

Wakefield’s comms team identified that social channels were an important way for building trust with their communities, however at that time Wakefield’s social media activities felt more tactical than strategic. The team operated on instinct and guesswork, rather than tangible data. They knew that they needed to become strategic and leverage data to drive decision-making, in order to build trust amongst their communities and contribute towards meeting the Council’s overall objectives.

The solution

Social media audit

The first step towards strategic success involved an in-depth social media audit of all of Wakefield’s corporate channels and over 90 service-led accounts. They analysed neighbouring Councils’ social media activities to identify areas for enhancement, and made sure they were always up to date with new trends.

As part of this work, the team also created a framework for ongoing, frequent audits to build a purpose for each channel based on their most active users.

Although this ‘audit’ phase required considerable time and investment from the team, it proved to be an invaluable part of the process.

User profiling informed social media content strategy

Through user profiling, the team were able to develop fundamental content principles and an overarching social media strategy for the Council, while viewing each channel as a distinct space for a specific audience with its own aims and objectives.

They identified Facebook as the online ‘face’ of their organisation to connect with the local community, LinkedIn to promote their culture and values, and TikTok to engage and inspire a younger audience. Through leveraging and analysing data, they understood each audience’s demographics and interests and were able to craft targeted narratives that they knew would resonate.

Customer Services became data-driven

As part of this work, Wakefield Council’s Customer Services team were also onboarded onto Orlo to enable an aligned and swift response to incoming queries. Then, queries were set up to be marked with an inbox tag so that the team could run reports to discuss at monthly meetings.

Internal framework for ongoing assessments and growth

The team at Wakefield Council implemented a strategic framework for in-depth reviews of their corporate accounts every few months, to promote continuous improvement. They now circulate a weekly social insight report observing the latest positive and negative theme alerts to help shape future content, and the Digital Team launched ‘Trend Fridays’ to analyse channel developments. They set up weekly drop-in brainstorming sessions and a monthly planning meeting to foster team collaboration, celebrate top post authors and analyse the data.
The team at Wakefield also now produces a social media report to hold themselves accountable for performance metrics against strategic goals.

As a result of its success, this framework has been extended to support Wakefield Council’s 90 service accounts. The team reviews all accounts biannually to identify service champions and share best practices, and to assess the value of all channels.

The results 

Increased trust

Following implementation of their strategy, Wakefield Council’s trust score rose by over 30%, reflecting a significant shift in users’ perception of their social media channels as a verified source of information.

Before their Customer Services teams used Orlo, customer queries had a trust indicator score of 74% and the main emotions were ‘confusion’ and ‘curiosity’ for inbound messages. In June 2024, trust levels reached a soaring 88% with ‘gratitude’ and ‘curiosity’ as their top emotions – proving that the community trusts, understands and appreciates them more.

Unified tone of voice

As a result of the new strategy and team’s alignment, Wakefield’s tone of voice is now consistent across all channels and represents one voice.

Improved user understanding

Tapping into data has helped Wakefield’s teams to deepen their understanding of the concerns of local communities.
Creation of an internal growth environment

Having a framework in place has meant that the team can adapt responsively when challenges arise. As an example, when Facebook engagement rates dipped significantly due to reach limitations on posts containing links in the body of the content, the team was able to swiftly pivot to placing links in comments instead. This proved successful, with link clicks increasing by 4k and engagement rate increasing from 0.5% to 1.9%.

The team has also snapped up opportunities to share learning, for example at a regional communications network and as a speaker at an Orlo event.

On winning the award for Best Use of Data Laura Hogan (Social and Digital Communications Manager at Wakefield Council) said:

The judging panel for Orlo’s Golden Ele Awards said:

“We really liked how Wakefield’s consistent approach to improving social output, through understanding audience data, helped the council drive increased engagement and public trust. They thought outside of the box, beyond typical social metrics and used trust and emotions.”

Congratulations to the team at Wakefield Council.