Alice Ainsworth

**UPDATE – shortlisted for Digital Excellence in CIPR Local Public Services Group’s Excellence in Communications Awards**

I was yabbering away in one of the Building the Perfect Council Website (#pcw09) plenary sessions a couple of weeks ago about how council comms/web/marketing people should just dip their toe into the water of social media – and was surprised by the general feeling of hesitation in the room.

My thinking: if you’re worried it might backfire or fall flat on its face just make it clear to everyone that it is a ‘pilot’. If it works, ‘excellent – the pilot was successsful, hooray’. If it fails ‘well, it doesn’t matter – it was only a pilot’.

(Pilot idea stolen from chief storyteller Tony Quinlan’s talk at LGComms conference earlier this year)

So, I thought I’d share an example of how we dipped our toes in the water at Southwark – and how it turned out pretty well. Not to say it wasn’t a steep learning curve but it was a fun one – and more to the point, a worthwhile one.

The case study below has been entered into the Digital Excellence category of the CIPR Local Public Services Group’s Excellence in Communications Awards (fingers crossed). A similar entry won Silver in the LGComms & LGA Reputation Awards for Best Environmental Campaign.

Background

Prior to December 2008 Southwark Council had no social media presence and no policy in place for using Facebook or Twitter. In fact the newly-established e-communications team had never used social media to implement a marketing campaign before.

So when Mayor of London Boris Johnson launched his ‘Help a London Park’ grants competition we considered it a perfect opportunity to pilot the use of a Facebook campaign.

Objectives

Our campaign had some key objectives:

Win Boris’s millions
Our main objective was to win the Mayor’s top grant of £2 million for Burgess Park which at 50 hectares sits in the poorest part of one of London’s most deprived boroughs, surrounded by sprawling 70s housing estates.

We had the added motivation that if we secured the £2 million we would then receive a further £4 million in match funding from Southwark Council and the New Deal for Communities.

Get local people actively involved
Burgess Park is central to a massive £2.5 billion regeneration scheme but as it stands, residents consider it “unloved”, “in need of a redesign”, and “unsafe after dark”.

Yet for most of the 70,000 people living within 5km of Burgess Park it is their only accessible, local, quality green space.

A particular focus of the campaign was to engage these local people, encourage them to take ownership of their local area and feel proud of their park.

Strategy and implementation

From the moment the shortlist was announced to the date of the decision there were just 10 short weeks. With a limited budget and a restrictive timeframe for planning and delivery we decided online media would be our most powerful tool.

The target audience for our campaign was Burgess Park users – young people, families and students not typically involved in council activity – as well as the local voluntary sector and community groups.

Our social media approach

We knew from research that our residents are keen Facebook users and that thousands of members already belonged to Southwark-related groups.

We created the group ‘Back the Burgess Park bid – we need Boris’s millions!’, allowing local people to get actively involved but in an informal, less traditional way.

Our approach was to:

• Choose an alliterative, eye-catching and amusing title for the group
• Use friendly, jargon-free language that focuses on the park and the people – not on the council’s involvement
• Give enthusiastic calls to action

We took a grass-roots approach to building a Facebook presence, knowing that people are far more likely to buy in to an idea if they hear it from their peers rather than their council. We wanted to create a word of mouth effect

We launched a range of social media applications, including a YouTube channel, Twitter account and Flickr photo library to help raise awareness of the campaign – all linking back to the Facebook group.

Other ways of driving traffic to our Facebook group included news stories on the council’s website homepage, links from the parks web pages, items posted in the local online community forums e.g. SE1, and prominent features on local newspaper websites and on the Friends of Burgess Park website.

We sent email messages to supporters over the weeks updating them on any news or events and encouraged them to provide their suggestions on what they wanted to see improved in the park.

Developing an integrated campaign

We recognised that our social media approach would work best if supported by traditional media.

Stakeholder support: Briefing notes from the Leader went to local strategic stakeholders including the police and NHS, asking them to write letters supporting the council’s bid, and also encouraged them to sign up to the Facebook group.

Councillors and influential local groups such as Friends of Burgess Park were briefed and asked to join our social media campaign.

We also arranged for Boris to receive hundreds of children’s drawings, as well as letters from local schools in support of the bid.

Internal communications: E-newsletters were sent to council staff and a series of news stories were published to the council‘s website and intranet.

Events: More than 500 locals turned out to support two concurrently run Help a London Park voting events – many of whom received the invitation through our Facebook group. Council staff donned blonde Boris-lookalike wigs to provide imaginative photo opportunities.

Presentation: A well thought-out presentation was made to the GLA panel, including a short video of resident voxpops (see YouTube video below). Exhibition panels produced by the Young Friends of Burgess Park expressed their aspirations for the park.

Media: We specifically targeted publications we knew the judging panel read, e.g. Horticulture Week.

Partnering the Southwark News provided weekly positive stories and the popularity of the Facebook group was used as a hook to sell stories into the trade and London press.

Evaluation and measurement

On March 4 2009 the Mayor of London announced that Burgess Park had won the transformational £2 million grant!

The Facebook group was considered a major factor in the park’s success and an example of good practice for the council’s new approach to online campaigns.

• We invited no more than 10 people to join the group yet within 10 weeks the group had swelled to 1,135 members – demonstrating effective word of mouth
• There were more than 80 posts to the wall and discussion forum about what people wanted to see happen to their park
• On the whole messages were overwhelmingly supportive of the council and the bid

The group was a powerful way to demonstrate the strength of feeling in the local community. Real people with honest opinions and experiences of the park provided depth to the campaign and the human face of the bid provided an emotive and convincing argument for us to win.

Comments made during the campaign

“Since I was a kid I regularly used Burgess Park to play football…but I always dreamed of just how good it would look if some serious money was spent on landscaping the park and making it feel like a destination. It still feels like a piece of reclaimed wasteland (which is what it actually is) and although funds have been allocated on an ad-hoc basis over the years to keep it looking vaguely presentable, Southwark Council have never had the budget to sort it out properly”

“Burgess park is such a huge green space in the middle of a very densely populated area. But, there is nothing to do in the park, the play facilities are awful, there is no designated footbal/basketball or tennis areas and it feels very unsafe and unkept. Please get some money to develop this rare open space in Central London for the people who live nearby.”

Comments made after we won:

“Yay this is amazing, good work. The lake is lovely i just really hope they put some lights up so we can walk through at night. YAY ”

“fantastic news,hope the money will be well spent on improving a great park!”

In the months since the announcement the Facebook group has been used to keep members informed of the progress and now forms part of the strategy to involve local people in the long-term future of their park.

Lessons learnt in the process have helped inform the social media policy for the council.

Positive media coverage

Throughout the campaign we received positive coverage in the South London Press, Southwark News, Horticulture Week, the Evening Standard and PR Week.

Our success was featured prominently on ITV London News, in the Evening Standard, London Paper and the locals.

Other evidence

An Ipsos-MORI survey carried out in the lead up to the parks announcement showed 83% of residents were satisfied with Southwark’s parks and open spaces – an all-time high.