the right tools for the job

When Andy Allsopp, Head of Communications at Cambridgeshire County Council, set his team the challenge of increasing voter turnout at the local elections, they decided to do something completely different and turned to a variety of new social media tools to help meet the target.

Sixty-nine seats were contested in June’s council elections in Cambridgeshire and for the first time since the early 1990s the County Council elections didn’t coincide with a general election – traditionally a recipe for a lower voter turnout.
Andy explains how he went about bucking this trend. “We didn’t want a traditional campaign that used traditional channels, such as newspaper advertising or bus backs, to get the message out about how important it was to vote. “We wanted to make the campaign interactive, to give people the opportunity to have their say, but also to get across, almost in a shop window style, just how important council services are. Using moving images was very important so we commissioned a series of videos, which aimed to illustrate not only some of the apathy that’s out there in terms of voting but also just how important council services are and why, therefore, it’s important to have your say in an election on them.
“So the campaign was strongly branded under the title of Do Something Amazing – we wanted to get people to think about voting and council services in a different way.”

The series of videos were posted on YouTube and the link sent to council staff so they could share it with their colleagues and friends outside the council and thus the videos were spread in a viral way.
Twitter was also a big success for Andy and his team. “We used Twitter to announce the results as they came in from the counts. The conversational nature of Twitter really came into its own here and conversations developed around the results from the people who had signed up to the service earlier on in the campaign as part of the wider publicity that we’d done.

“For example, we had a husband and wife ‘team’ elected to the council – the wife was elected first and there was some speculation about whether her husband would be elected too. He did make it in the end but we had a lot of fun tweeting about it in the meantime.”
An array of social media tools – blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – were all useful in helping Andy achieve his target of increasing voter turnout. “We achieved a five per cent increase in the number of people who turned out to vote, which was the key objective of the campaign. From my point of view, being a professional communicator, these are channels that our audiences are using, therefore it would be folly to ignore them.”
Andy believes the growth of social media is putting excitement back into communication activities. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to be innovative in the way that you approach communications,” he says. “And, with public services looking at making some pretty serious savings over the next few years, it’s a low-cost or even no-cost activity which makes it all the more compelling when you are trying to balance the books as well as communicate effectively.
“I think in future we need to get bolder and braver in terms of the scope of communication activities in which we employ new media. We’re still in the early days of evaluating their efficacy, but I’m convinced they will help us reach audiences and interact with them far more effectively than the narrower scope of channels that we were previously employing.”

If you’d like to hear the interview with Andy Allsopp in full please click on the podcast link.