Social media management, social listening, media monitoring, surveys and digital customer service all sit in the same platform, on the same data. That means one login, one audit trail and one view of your community, instead of stitching together a scheduler, a listening tool, a survey platform and a live chat widget from four different suppliers.
Why Orlo
Generic social media tools, standalone survey platforms and enterprise listening software were built for brand marketing. Orlo is the AI-optimised community engagement platform, built for councils, NHS trusts, police forces, housing associations and central government, and that difference shows up in every part of the platform and customer service.
Supporting 400+ public sector clients.
Building trust with 51 million citizens.
Handling over 125 million conversations.
The problem with generic tools
Most public sector teams don’t start with Orlo. They start with a scheduling tool for social media, a separate survey tool for consultations, and a listening tool bolted on when a crisis makes the gap obvious. Each one was designed for a marketing team trying to grow followers, not a comms team trying to keep residents safe, informed and heard. Orlo exists because public sector organisations kept hitting the same wall: tools built for selling more product don’t fit teams built to serve their communities.
What makes Orlo different
- One platform, not five vendors
- AI built for accountability, not just automation
- Trust you can prove, not vanity metrics
- Compliant and secure as standard, not bolted on
- Built around the workflows your sector actually runs
- Proven at scale with organisations like yours
- A partner, not just a platform
One platform, not five vendors
Housing associations tell us this directly: consolidating the stack cuts vendor count, cost and audit risk, and it means resident voice, from a tweet to a repair complaint to a satisfaction survey, lives in one place instead of three.
AI built for accountability, not just automation
Generic AI tools are built to sell products and grow audiences. Public service carries duties around transparency, safeguarding and data protection that commercial AI was never designed for. Orlo’s AI is human-led by design: every model supports a decision rather than replacing it, every AI-assisted action is logged for governance and FOI, and every byte of data stays inside a domestically-hosted, security-assured environment.
That AI sits across the whole platform, not bolted onto one feature. It drafts and reworks content in your tone of voice, generates accessibility-compliant alt-text, reads sentiment and emotion across millions of conversations, flags deepfakes and sensitive images before a human ever sees them, and routes and prioritises inbound messages so the right case reaches the right team first.
For police forces specifically, Shield and Assist applies this AI to detect, triage and manage harmful content directed at officers at scale, with human oversight throughout. In pilot, it ran at 98% system accuracy, deflected 84% of relevant workload, and returned 76% of direct capacity to the team.
Wakefield Council used Orlo’s AI-powered Trust Indicator to identify the drivers of community trust and act on them, contributing to a 30% uplift in trust.
Trust you can prove, not vanity metrics
Reach and engagement tell you activity happened. They don’t tell you whether your community trusts you more or less as a result. Orlo’s Trust Indicator turns sentiment and emotion into a single, trackable score, so you can show your board or your inspectorate that what you did actually moved the needle, not just that you posted more.
South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority used this approach to measure an 83% increase in trust around the SYMCA brand after replacing scattered, noisy listening streams with structured, sector-specific ones.
Compliant and secure as standard, not bolted on
Orlo holds ISO 27001, ISO 22301, Cyber Essentials, SOC 2, and Cyber Essentials Plus, is GDPR compliant, hosts data in the UK for UK customers and the US for US based customers, and is available through G-Cloud 14 and CCS frameworks.
Generic tools built for private-sector marketing teams were never designed for this level of scrutiny. Retrofitting compliance after the fact is expensive and risky. Orlo starts there.
Built around the workflows your sector actually runs
A safeguarding concern raised in a comment needs a different path to resolution than a customer asking about opening hours. A council managing a red-warning storm needs priority tagging and rapid escalation, not a generic inbox. A housing provider working to Awaab’s Law needs to surface damp and disrepair concerns raised online but never formally reported, not just track likes.
That’s why Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council could cut response times for high-risk messages by 50% during a live storm response, using structured permissions and automated priority tagging built for exactly that situation. Generic marketing inboxes don’t have an equivalent, because they were never built to need one.
Proven at scale with organisations like yours
Orlo works with 400+ public sector organisations across local government, central government, policing, healthcare, housing, fire and rescue, higher education, and travel and transport, including 90% of UK police forces and 150+ local authorities. That’s not a generic customer base adapted to public sector use. It’s the reason the platform is built the way it is.
A partner, not just a platform
Public sector teams don’t just need software, they need a team that understands the sector’s pressures: stretched budgets, scrutiny, safeguarding duties, and the reality that a comms team of two might run eight channels. Customers consistently point to onboarding, training and named customer success managers as reasons they stay, and in some cases, why they come back after trying something else.
“We’ve had great support right throughout this process from the Orlo team, who really understand the unique challenges we face in policing.”
Ben Cole, Dyfed-Powys Police
“The team at Orlo are exceptionally helpful and are always accommodating. From the introduction to the product, ongoing customer success and continual training and development, the team has always been there when we need them.”
Jack Wickenden-Showell, Horsham District Council
“Rosie, our CSM, she’s excellent, she pushes us just enough to do what we need to do, because in housing we can be quite slow to make changes. Her support has been invaluable.”
Gavin Short, United Welsh
“Some of our big reasons for coming back were seeing some really big advancements in the tech. I think also that the customer offer that Orlo’s got is a really strong value for us. We really want to have tech partners and tech in our team where we know we’ll get that support. Great training and onboarding, which is really important.”
Jake, Lambeth Council
Orlo vs generic tools
| Generic social media tools | Generic survey / listening tools | Orlo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for public sector compliance and scrutiny | ✕ No | ✕ Rarely | ✓ Yes, from the ground up |
| UK data residency and G-Cloud / CCS procurement route | ✕ Rarely | ✕ Rarely | ✓ Yes |
| Publishing, listening, surveys and customer service in one platform | ✕ No | ✕ No | ✓ Yes |
| FOI-ready audit trail and tamper-evident conversation records | ✕ No | ✕ No | ✓ Yes |
| Safeguarding and escalation workflows | ✕ No | ✕ No | ✓ Yes |
| Measures public trust, not just reach | ✕ No | ~ Partial | ✓ Yes, with the Trust Indicator |
| Named public sector references at scale | ✕ Rarely | ✕ Rarely | ✓ 400+ organisations, 90% of UK police forces |
| AI built for public sector accountability, with human-in-the-loop and audit trail | ✕ No | ✕ No | ✓ Yes |
| Named support team with public sector experience | ✕ No | ✕ Rarely | ✓ Yes, named CSMs across every sector |
Results our customers have seen
These aren't projections. They're outcomes our customers have measured and shared with us, across councils, housing associations, the NHS and emergency services.
Secure as standard
As the only community engagement platform built exclusively for the public sector, you can rest assured your data is in safe hands.
- UK Based Servers
- ISO27001
- Cyber Essentials Plus
- GDPR Compliant
- CCS Supplier
Learn more about Orlo security
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“Working with over 400 public sector , we are committed to ensuring our software is secure, compliant and that we hold the appropriate credentials approved by the government”
Hardeep Johal
Orlo, Chief Technology Officer
“To ensure appropriate cyber security controls are in place and reduce cyber security risks in supply chains, the government has required suppliers to hold Cyber Essentials & Cyber Essentials Plus…This PPN applies to all Central Government Departments, Executive Agencies and Non-Departmental Public Bodies”
