Communication and Engagement Annual Overview 2023/24

The Communications and Engagement Team provides communications guidance and support across the organisation to manage reputation and ensure key audiences (internal and external) are aware of service delivery, developments and change. 

The team supports the organisation across all service areas in ensuring the delivery of key messages to target audiences across appropriate channels, and in facilitating effective and co-ordinated consultation and engagement. The Communications and Engagement team also support East Dunbartonshire Leisure and Culture Trust, East Dunbartonshire Health and Social Care Partnership and provides expertise, support and guidance to all Council schools.

Priorities in 2023/2024 included delivering communications plans to support the official openings of Woodland View School and Allander Leisure Centre, the Regent Gardens works, City Deal, the launch of the Traffic Free schools pilot, the new Council, HSCP and EDLC websites project, and the Civic Office.

Key areas include:

• Reputation management
• Engagement with regional and national resilience networks
• Digital communications (social media and website)
• Media Relations
• Internal communication and employee engagement
• Design
• Consultation and engagement
• Accessibility.

Effective communications planning supports the Council’s strategic priorities. It aims to ensure public understanding of these and supports awareness raising of new initiatives or service delivery plans, while encouraging positive calls to action for campaign and consultation activity.

The Communications and Engagement team support Council and Service Committees ensuring key decisions are effectively communicated. This includes reviewing Council and Committee reports, engaging with Conveners and lead officers, and effectively promoting decisions and developments online and through appropriate media networks.

Communication plans are prepared for all key Council projects and developments, including the capital programme, service changes and key initiatives in support of the Council’s priorities aimed at residents and/ or employees. Plans include both external and internal communications requirements.

Effective planning also ensures that communications are delivered to appropriate timescales in line with project plans and that services are not competing to deliver important messages to their target audiences.

Media relations continues to remain an important tool for reputational
management, and for advising residents and businesses in the local area of service updates and campaigns.

During 2023/2024, a total of 157 press releases were issued, 58 photocalls organised and 212 media enquiries responded to. All responses to these enquiries met the deadlines set by the journalist.

The team continues to engage with local, regional and national news outlets for both proactive and reactive media activity. The local media coverage achieved from those 157 proactive releases equated to a total of £71,408 if the Council had purchased that coverage through advertising.

The Council’s social media accounts – Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube – are key communication channels. These
continue to grow in terms of numbers, as well as influence. Important metrics including audience size, engagement and click throughs to the website, all continue to perform well year on year.

The Communications and Engagement team manage these channels through a social media management tool which retains an audit trail of who posts to the accounts and when. It enables the team to schedule posts at appropriate times of day and provides analytics on each channel.

Facebook and X remain the most popular social media channels used by the Council to share information on service delivery and key projects, initiatives and campaigns. However, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube have all seen considerable growth throughout 2023/2024. All channels are also used to encourage participation in consultation and engagement activity.

Facebook

By the end of 2023/2024, 24,027 people – approximately 22% of the total population of East Dunbartonshire – follow the Council’s Facebook page. This percentage is likely to be significantly higher as the population figure includes those aged 0 upwards, while only those aged 13 or over can access Facebook.

X

By the end of the year X (Twitter) had 20,696 followers, an increase of almost 600 followers in a year when globally, users have significantly dropped due to changes to the platform.

LinkedIn

Used to engage with stakeholders, partners, residents and employees to promote job opportunities and key Council activity, by the end of the year there were 3,720 followers, an increase of 20% on last year.

Instagram

This channel continued to grow and ended the year with 761 followers while there was an 80.7% increase in profile visits.

YouTube

In 2023/2024 a key objective for the Communications and Engagement team was to increase the number of subscribers to the Council’s YouTube channel. While the target was a 4% growth, results showed a 29% rise was achieved.

The information below outlines the main performance indicators used globally, to measure the performance of social media channels. Compared to 2023/2024 our audience size rose by 3,716 or 8% and click throughs increased by 6,658 or 5%.

Facebook

Engagement 696,963
Audience Size 24,027
Amplification rate 6,672
Click throughs 94,999

X (Twitter)

Engagement 28,972
Audience Size 20,696
Amplification rate 1,912
Click throughs 21,641

LinkedIn

Engagement 13,860
Audience Size 3,720
Amplification rate 162
Click throughs 11,093

Instagram

Engagement 1380
Audience Size 761
Amplification rate n/a
Click throughs 96

Total 2023/24

Engagement 741,175
Audience Size 49,204
Amplification rate 8,747
Click throughs 127,829

Year on Year comparison 2022/2023

Engagement -104,370
Audience Size +3,716
Amplification rate -3,845
Click throughs +6,658

It should be noted that social media companies have changed the way engagement is recorded which has led to the figure appearing as significantly less than last year. However, engagement on all four channels continues to remain above average.

Table 3 to Table 6 below provide a breakdown of the key social media metrics by Quarter. This highlights the regularity in which residents engage with our social media channels throughout the year. Online campaigns specifically timed for throughout the year ensure our channels continue to perform well even during months widely regarded as ‘quieter’ such as school summer holidays and the festive period.

The year’s most popular post on Facebook was about the selection of a preferred route for the new Westerhill Development Road, which had 71,223 impressions, 59 reactions, 30 comments and 71 shares.

On X (Twitter), the most viewed post of the year was information relating to industrial action affecting our Early Years Centres in September 2023. It had 21,699 impressions, 9 comments, 19 retweets, 22 likes and nearly 2,000 link clicks taking people through to our website.

The most popular post on LinkedIn was the news that Lenzie Academy is to receive Scottish Government funding for a new, state-of-the-art school. It was viewed by 5,439 people and had 144 reactions, 5 shares and 204 link clicks.

Further positive news relating to major projects such as the Lennoxtown High Park Sports facility, the official openings of Woodland View School and Allander Leisure Centre, and the return of the Canal Festival were also extremely popular over the course of the year on all channels.

The Council website remains a crucial communication channel for the Council and in 2023/2024 there was a total of 2,782,293 page views with 1,610,532 overall visits as indicated in Table 7 below.

The overall trend for 2023/2024 is down on the year before and while there is no one reason as to why this has occurred, it can be noted that as more and more people use our social media channels, combined with online platforms discouraging the use of weblinks in posts, residents are accessing a lot of the information they need from us via our social media posts.

Visitor traffic remained consistent throughout the year with peaks in August, November and January. In August increased visits were related to the UCI Cycling Championships and road closures, in November due to School registration, and in January school placing requests.

The scheduled road closures and road works page which was created in February 2023 to allow residents to access this information easier, received 42,380 page views during 2023/2024.

Table 8 (above) clearly shows that most visitors to the Council website continue to use a mobile phone rather than a desktop/laptop computer to visit the website.

The figures show that there was a slight increase of 2.5% in mobile usage taking the figure from 58.4% to 59.9%. Meanwhile there continues to be small decreases in the usage of Tablets. This reflects global trends and reinforces the need to ensure information
12 is accessible for mobile devices.

Most visitors to the website during 2023/2024 used Search engines to find the information they need with over 500,000 visits made in this way. Direct traffic is the second most popular traffic source, meaning visitors know the web address and use it directly.

Social media referral statistics via the analytics tool we use for our website are not accurate due to various privacy settings, use of VPNs (Virtual Private Network) and users not accepting Cookies. A VPN is a private connection between a device and the internet which provides a private tunnel for the users’ data and communications while using a public network.

However, when we use the data from our social media tool, we can see that the number of social media referrals is 127,829 which represents a 5% increase on last year.

The most popular page on the Council website is School Holidays. The next two are related to Waste and while this has been the case historically, the Waste pages have continued to be given a boost due to our food campaign which ran throughout the year.

Making a Payment, Planning and Registering for Education also remain popular. The Scheduled Road closures and road works webpage, which we launched in 2023 has appeared in the top ten most popular pages proving the need for such a page.

The information below summarises the page views and page visits for the top ten pages on the Council website. Views is defined by the total number of times a page is looked at, whilst Visits is when someone goes to the website and looks around at more than one page.

School holidays

Page Views 245,060 

% of total views 6.00% 

Visits 242,712 

% of total visits 9.50%

Household waste and recycling centres (tips/dumps)

Page Views 160,851  

% of total views 4.00%

Visits 158,864 

% of total visits 6.20%

Bins and recycling

Page Views 95,797  

% of total views 2.40%

Visits 91,750 

% of total visits 3.60%

Make a payment

Page Views 72,500   

% of total views 1.80%

Visits 57,422

% of total visits 2.30%

Planning Applications search

Page Views 56,853  

% of total views 1.40% 

Visits 54,463

% of total visits 2.10%

Scheduled road closures and road works

Page Views 47,127  

% of total views 1.20%

Visits 45,792 

% of total visits 1.80%

Registration for education

Page Views 45,480   

% of total views 1.10%

Visits 36,590

% of total visits 1.40%

Recycling and waste

Page Views 34,282   

% of total views 0.80%

Visits 33,956

% of total visits 1.30%

Street A-Z (waste download)

Page Views 33,390  

% of total views 0.80%

Visits 29,470

% of total visits 1.20%

Contact us

Page Views 27,501  

% of total views 0.70%

Visits 27,227 

% of total visits 1.10%

The Communications and Engagement team also maintain and update both the East Dunbartonshire Health & Social Care Partnership (HSCP) website and the East Dunbartonshire Leisure & Culture Trust (EDLC) website. This centralised service also provides support to all East Dunbartonshire schools by maintaining and regularly updating their websites.

The project to replace the Council, HSCP and EDLC websites’ content management system has continued throughout 2023/2024. The Communications and Engagement team have co-led the project participating in workshops, user testing, design sessions and manually migrating the content for all three sites. Key aims of the website replacement project are to create a new Council website that is citizen centric, with improved navigation and is built with Accessibility at its core. EDLC’s new site was successfully launched in March 2024, and work is ongoing to the Council and HSCP sites.

Design is vital in telling the Council’s story and providing service updates in a way that is eye catching, informative and engaging. The Council’s design service had over 600 jobs in 2023/2024. These were a mix of posters, social media graphics, documents and video, and represent a 28% increase on last year.

A 68% growth on video creation was also achieved as video remains a highly effective engagement and information tool.

On Facebook there were 66,978 minutes of videos viewed, an increase of 64.5% from 2022/23. Videos promoting our Food Waste campaign, pupils getting a sneak peak of the new Woodland View School, and promoting East Dunbartonshire as a tourist destination, gained the most minutes viewed and the highest engagement.

Other popular videos were those created to promote careers in Early Years and our Festive Bin arrangements.

Currently, there are 608 subscribers to the official East Dunbartonshire Council YouTube channel and in 2023/24 there were 74,518 views of our videos resulting in 1,863.8 hours watched.

Campaigns are a crucial tool for the Council. Not only do they raise awareness and encourage call to action, but they also help to build reputation and loyalty.

Increasingly the campaigns we do are aimed at behaviour change rather than awareness raising. Services should know what they want to achieve so that the Communications and Engagement team can plan activity that works towards these objectives.

In 2023/2024 the Communications and Engagement team ran three major multi- channel campaigns and a range of smaller, social media campaigns such as Early Years recruitment, tourism, and taxi driver applications.

East Dunbartonshire residents are highly engaged when it comes to recycling. However, the amount of people using the food waste service decreased in recent years following a brief suspension of the service in 2020 due to COVID-19.

A waste compositional analysis revealed that over 30 per cent of the items being put into grey residual bins was made up of food waste. Instead of being recycled, it was ending up in landfill.

Building on our previously successful ‘Right Bin? Put it in’ campaign, a new campaign was developed to encourage more residents to use the weekly food recycling service and to attract back those who previously utilised it.

The aims of the campaign:
• To increase food waste recycling set-out (participation) rates.
• To increase the amount (tonnage) of food waste being collected.
• To decrease the amount of food waste in residual bins.
• To raise awareness that there are food caddies available if needed.

The campaign strategy was broken down into two stages: Focusing on positive messaging related to food waste; and encouraging those without kerbside or kitchen food caddies to request one so they could participate.

We worked with our Waste team to understand current levels of food waste participation through a survey of 1025 homes and used waste compositional analysis to help us form key messaging and a call to action.

We knew we would have to use a variety of communication methods to reach as many people as possible and drive behavioural change. To make people want to take part we needed to demonstrate how everyone would be making a difference and implementing change by highlighting the environmental impact. We also wanted to change attitudes and ensure the campaign had a long-lasting impact.

It needed to be accessible, so we ensured there was a combination of digital and offline communications that avoided corporate language and were in plain English. Taking all this into consideration we worked with our Waste colleagues to establish six SMART objectives (see below).

What we did:
• Created fresh artwork and videos.
• Advertised at the four main train stations in the area.
• Press releases.
• Vinyl prints on side of food waste fleet vehicles.
• Mixture of organic and paid-for social media posts and YouTube videos.
• Inclusion in Depute Chief Executive Update.
• Webpage update.

Results in numbers
• 191.8K people reached through Facebook ads.
• 313K post impressions across all platforms.
• 4.4K engagements across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
• 45.9K YouTube video views.
• 43.6K Facebook video views.
• 3.7K link clicks across all platforms.

Importantly the campaign helped to encourage behavioural change. There was a significant increase in the number of requests for kitchen and kerbside food caddies as well as a 7.6% increase in food waste participation across the area.
• Kitchen caddies rose from 414 to 556 (an increase of 495).
• Kerbside caddies rose from 1066 to 1561 (an increase of 142).

Of 1024 households surveyed, participation increased from 379 to 457. These results exceeded the targets set at the outset of the campaign as shown in Table 10 below.

Importantly the campaign helped to encourage behavioural change with significant results across a range of measures clearly showing this. There was a reduction in the amount of recycling material included in residual waste collections, shown by a 585 tonne reduction in collection, plastic recycling increased by 3.97% and food waste participation rose by 7.2%.

These results exceeded the targets set at the outset of the campaign as shown in Table 10 below.

Internal Communications provide relevant organisational updates to the Council’s workforce. This aligns with programme delivery and is carried out in conjunction with employee engagement requirements which are co-ordinated through HR & Organisational Development.
Internal Communications are planned alongside change projects, with communications plans in place in line with project timescales.

Established tools such as Leadership Information Packs, Employee News and All User Emails remain in place.

In 2023/2024 a total of 36 Employee News were issued, compared to 46 in 2022/2023. These are published to the Employee Zone of the Council website so that line managers and colleagues can share with those members of staff who are not on the Council network.

Regular updates to the whole workforce, including a roundup of the key achievements, news issues and Council decisions were delivered fortnightly through the Depute Chief Executive’s Update (DCE Update).

As with Employee News, these are all published to the Employee Zone of the Council website. In 2023/2024 16 DCE Updates were issued compared to 21 in 2022/2023. Due to changes to the Senior Management structure, a focus for 2024/2025 will be looking at how to ensure future internal communications of this nature are meaningful and effective.

The project to replace the Council’s intranet continued with phase 1 including the construction of the site, structure, design and governance explored and implemented. While the new intranet continues to be under development, the current intranet (the Hub) and the Employee Zone on the website continue to be updated

The Communications and Engagement team supports the Council in the implementation and delivery of the Consultation and Engagement Strategy. The principles of ‘we asked, you said, we did’ applies to Council consultation and engagement activity, with services that undertake consultation and engagement exercises encouraged to ensure they provide the results (you said) and what will happen as a result of the findings (we did).

A Consultation and Engagement Action Plan is produced each year with services asked to include planned consultation activity in their Business and Improvement Plans (BIPs).

The plan allows the Communications and Engagement team to effectively plan and promote the delivery of consultation activity. Working with services, the team offers guidance and expertise, prepares and creates surveys, develops webpages and plans effective promotion to the target audience. The Action Plan allows timescales to be explored and potential clashes to be avoided. Ultimately the plan and subsequent work is aimed at encouraging participation.

In 2023/2024 the team supported services across the Council with 20 consultations, an increase on 15 last year. Support was also given to HSCP on five consultations carried out. Topics included City Deal activity, Community Grants, Council Budget, Local Development Plan 3. A full list can be found within the Consultation section of the website.

Once a consultation closes, results and data are sent to the service to analyse. Thank you and update messages to the relevant audience are posted on the appropriate webpage and posted on social media. A post consultation report detailing online engagement and other key statistics is also completed and sent to the service for information. Once the service is in the position to publish its findings and/or the report that was guided by the consultation, the Communications and Engagement team ensure this is available on the website and subsequent promotion is carried out.

Public Sector (Website and Mobile Applications) Regulations require councils to ensure that their websites, social media channels and any apps they develop are fully accessible to all.

The Communications and Engagement team has spent considerable time working to ensure that the Council website meets the requirements of the legislation.

To ensure accessibility was built into the new Council, HSCP and EDLC websites from the start, we have been working with the Shaw Trust as part of the project plan. The Shaw Trust have so far manually tested both the designs and test site, with guidance and results fed back so changes can be made pre the go live date. After this date, a further test to the Council website will be carried out and accreditation awarded.

An Accessibility section in the Employee Zone of the Council website has been updated to include M365 capability, to provide guidance to all employees on how to make sure that their documents are accessible, and the graphic designers are using a new online tool to check colour contrast and accessibility of artwork.

The focus for the Communications and Engagement team in 2024/2025 remains promoting Council priorities and service delivery in the media, online and internally. The team will ensure a range of relevant channels are used to target key audiences, the team will continue to collate and analyse the metrics to make data driven decisions.

The replacement website will continue to be a major project and work is ongoing to ensure the Council and HSCP websites go live this year. Google Analytics 4, a digital data analysis tool, will subsequently be implemented to ensure accurate and live data can be accessed and the performance of the site regularly monitored.

A number of protocols will be updated to reflect changes to the Senior Management team and the Consultation and Engagement Strategy will also be reviewed and updated in the year ahead. The team will continue to deliver communications for the Capital Projects Programme and in particular the school rebuild and refurbishment projects.

Campaigns for the Scotland Loves Local gift card and changes to the Waste service following Budget decisions to charge for garden waste and move to three-weekly collections for residual waste will also be planned and launched.