Grab a coffee and a breakfast pastry while you mingle with colleagues and peers from right across the public sector.

As CEO of Orlo, Deane will be on hosting duties for this year’s BIG Social.

The world is changing, and Mountain Rescue has to change with it. Social media is inspiring a new generation to explore the outdoors – to seek out hidden gems and experiences. But inspiration doesn’t always come with preparation. A spectacular photograph can hide rapidly changing weather, challenging terrain and risks that experience teaches us to recognise. That is the gap Mountain Rescue must fill.

Our challenge is no longer simply to respond when things go wrong. It is to reach people before they need us, to influence the influencers, cut through misinformation and turn attention into safer decisions.

Because every callout comes at a cost – not just to the individual, but to the volunteers who leave their jobs, families and lives to respond. With demand rising and resources limited, we cannot simply keep responding to the consequences. We have to get better at preventing them.

Communication is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a life-safety tool. The opportunity is to use social listening and evidence-led communications to understand emerging behaviours, reach people where they are and influence decisions before incidents happen. To move from reacting to demand to preventing it. From responding to risk, to anticipating it. From rescue to prevention. Because the ultimate measure of our success is not simply how many people we rescue. It is how many people never need rescuing.

How do you engage a community that feels unheard, excluded and sceptical about change?

This session will explore how Liverpool City Council developed a joined-up engagement approach for a community, covering a number of complex and interconnected areas: housing regeneration, land regeneration, a new school development, new traffic control measures and active travel.

Dan will explain how the Council combined quantitative data to understand the area with qualitative insight, pre-engagement and social listening to understand people’s lived experiences. He will share how Orlo supported the approach through social listening, targeted social media campaigns, a highly customised online survey, AI-supported analysis and campaign monitoring.

The session will demonstrate how technology was combined with face-to-face engagement, local community networks, printed materials and a dedicated microsite to achieve brilliant outcomes.

The session will focus on practical lessons for using digital tools as part of a transparent, community-led approach that helps rebuild trust and ensures residents feel involved and listened to.

Organic social media is pretty much dead. That’s the musing of some comms pros in the public sector, who have mothballed their X account and are now struggling to find audience and engagement on Facebook and Instagram.

Time to focus on other channels. Time to reassess and retreat from the tyranny of the algorithm.

Or maybe not?

Since launching his data in communications consultancy, Alex Waddington has poured over hundreds of thousands of data points, working with colleagues across the public sector to understand what really works and what doesn’t when it comes to engaging communities and building trust.

He goes far beyond heuristics like ‘best time to post’ and ‘video or carousel’, and has sought to understand the genuine ‘hot buttons’ in public sector comms; content that he sees bringing social media alive and giving it wings, time and again.

In this session, Alex will reveal his unique Typology of Successful Organic content, developed using Orlo data over several years – and will explain why being data-informed matters more than ever.

Alex will be joined by Stockport’s Council communications team, who will explain how the Typology and a data-informed approach has helped them bring fresh life and ideas into their organic social media.

Isobel will be bringing to life this best practice case study from the team at South Wales Police, detailing how they were able to reach 1.6 million people across their socials by breaking the mould. Ditching the usual polished social posts in favour of a more raw, storytelling campaign.

This session will also involve an interactive workshop brought to you by Alan Oram from Alive With Ideas where we’ll be discussing the power of being bold with your approach to your own social campaigns, thinking outside the box, and considering a more human perspective can often have the biggest impact.

With the local government reorganisation (LGR) programme paused by government in most areas, work continues at pace in Surrey. Join Mike, Richard and Holly from Surrey County Council as they take a pause and reflect on their own LGR journey.

The team will share practical advice on collaboration, building resilience, managing expectations, and accepting that perfection is off the table, whilst revealing lessons learned so far. This candid session will also explore the people aspects of a major transformation programme like LGR, acknowledging job security concerns and the emotional toll of merging teams and cultures, beyond the logistical challenges. Bring your questions for an open-floor discussion and leave with honest lessons, practical takeaways, and reflections on how to use today’s pause to build readiness, resilience and momentum for whatever comes next in your LGR journey.

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AI is officially here to stay, with Gartner predicting that 80% of public sector leaders will be using AI agents for routine decisions by 2028. However, your AI is only ever as good as the data sitting behind it, and right now, that data is sitting in silos.

In this session from Orlo’s product team, we’ll be diving into the future of public sector communications to explore why joining the dots matters more than ever. We’ll discuss how unifying your data – from complaints and casework to surveys and social media, – gives you a truly holistic view of your community. With social cohesion now a national priority, comms teams find themselves firmly on the frontline. We’ll show how bringing this data into one actionable view gives you the vital context needed to detect early tensions, tackle misinformation, and accurately gauge community sentiment.

What you’ll get from this session:

Understand how breaking down silos and connecting data across the public sector gives you an unparalleled 360-degree view of your community, allowing you to move beyond simply listening and start taking meaningful action.

Discover the power of natural language querying and learn how you can ask your data questions in plain English to get evidence-based answers instantly, saving you hours of dashboard building.

Get a glimpse into ‘Synthetic Citizen’, a forward-looking view on predictive AI and how modelling a community or place can allow you to test reactions and strategies before you hit send.

Social housing is experiencing one of the most significant periods of change in its history. New regulation, rising customer expectations, increasing scrutiny, financial pressures and rapid advances in artificial intelligence are forcing organisations to rethink how they design and deliver services. Drawing on insights from his book Listen, Act, Change: The Customer Experience Transformation in Social Housing, Oliver Goldring will explore what the housing sector can teach the wider public sector about creating meaningful change. He will share practical lessons from customer experience, service design, digital transformation and communications, highlighting why technology alone rarely fixes poor services.

The session will examine how organisations can use customer insights, engagement, and AI to better understand people’s needs, improve services, and build trust, while ensuring that human-centred design remains at the heart of decision-making.

Having access to social data is one thing; knowing how to listen, filter out the noise, and embed social intelligence into your team’s daily routines is another challenge entirely. For many public sector organisations, social listening can feel overwhelming – where do you start, what should you actually listen for, and how do you turn online chatter into real-world action?

That’s where Orlo’s Professional Services Team steps in. In this practical, story-led session, discover how Orlo’s strategic consultancy, expert data structuring, and process mapping take organisations from complete social listening novices to data-driven powerhouses.

Joined by representatives from Lambeth Council and Northumbria Police, we’ll explore how Orlo’s consultants worked hand in hand with their teams to bridge the skills gap, build custom frameworks, and seamlessly embed social listening into their everyday workflows.

What we’ll cover:

Teaching the art of strategic listening with Lambeth Council. Discover how Orlo’s expert consultants guided Lambeth’s comms team on how to effectively listen to complex social conversations. Helping them set up tailored theme alerts around recurring community safety concerns, Orlo’s Professional Services Team enabled them to embed social intelligence directly into their strategic comms planning. Learn how this consultancy empowered them to produce community-inspired content, specifically designed to build trust and foster cohesion.

Designing and embedding daily processes with Northumbria Police. Hear how the Orlo Team assisted the team at Northumbria in cleaning, filtering, and prioritising extensive data sets, enabling them to quickly identify what truly matters. Understand how the team guided the force in embedding Insights into their daily 8 AM operational routine and helped establish a ‘viral matrix’ to decide when immediate action is required. The payoff? This strategy led to a same-day arrest.

Understand how Orlo’s Professional Services Team helps those who don’t know where to begin with social listening, with expert consultancy giving public sector teams the tools, confidence and strategy needed to drive tangible, real-world impact.

What do employee social media mistakes teach us about reputation, culture and accountability, and how do we approach it?

Orlo’s awards are returning for another year, with over 400 customers across the public sector; there’s no shortage of amazing stories and remarkable achievements to celebrate.

Orlo’s Spotlight Awards are made up of 8 individual categories, so this is your opportunity to give well-deserved recognition to your organisation, team or an outstanding colleague who has made a significant contribution and impact. Share the extraordinary campaigns, strategies and work that your organisation has accomplished over the past 12 months to create stronger, more resilient communities.

Rachel Duffy is our very special guest host, taking to the stage for this year’s Spotlight Awards. Whether navigating complex public sector comms or steering the endgame of the UK’s biggest reality show, we couldn’t think of a better host to help us celebrate the exceptional talent across the Orlo community.