East of England Ambulance Service wanted to give a snapshot of what it handles in one of its busiest 24hr periods. This case study forms part of our social media strategy resource.
Objectives – what did you want to achieve?
We have a long-standing Twitterthon campaign from ambulance ride-outs, and wanted to give a 24 - hour snapshot at one of our busiest times. We decided to do it on what the 999s traditionally call Black Friday – the run up to Christmas and New Year.
We wanted to focus on ambulances and control rooms together so we had three members of the Comms team tweet from the three rooms, before a fourth covered a 12-hour ambulance shift. We wanted to keep our followers informed through shareable content, celebrate our staff and volunteers and align with the Trust’s objectives of open and transparent operations, and challenge beliefs and bust myths.
Audiences – who did you target and why?
Like other NHS organisations, we have a mixture of audiences on Twitter (17.6k at the moment) including individuals, stakeholders, and media outlets (mainly regional, but some national).
We felt we couldn’t do a lot of targeted work for different groups but our approach with rideouts is ‘If only we could get you all on board an ambulance or in a control room, this is what you would see.’
Strategy – how did you make this happen?
The strategy was devised and executed by Digital Officer Gail Huggins. She worked out where we needed to be, how the timings could slot into one another seamlessly, decided that we finish on a flourish with an ambulance ride out after spending 12 hours in three control rooms. She briefed the team and collected stats and information about the different geographical areas and demand so that we had back-up tweets.
On the day Gail had a helicopter view of planned and actual activities, checking on everyone’s welfare and planning for any changes we might have needed to make. We also had to make sure that we had at least two colleagues available to cover BAU work while all this was going on.
Tactics – what channels, tools, platforms and content did you use? Being a Twitterthon, we just used Twitter. The options of Vine and Periscope were open to the team, which were used on the rideout; Facebook live is not yet an option to us as we’re not yet verified.
Did it work? What were the outcomes?
It had a good mix of tweets and messages; the tweeters used their own ‘voice’ to feel as connected to the audience as possible. It was a good opportunity to connect with control room staff who seemed particularly switched on with the event. Our audience was right behind us and were especially interested in the 999 calls coming in.
People are always fascinated by how we deal with them!During the 24 hours we posted 172 tweets and gained 169 followers to add to our 14.3m total. During a normal Twitterthon we expect to gain 20- 30 followers so it was a significant increase. We also secured 722 likes, 638 retweets and 275.3k impressions.
What did you learn?
That interest in our activity can really vary at different points of the day, more than we perhaps appreciated. We also learnt the importance of better media placement and marketing, the need to increase followers before an event to maximise reach and the need
to build in resilience.
Would you do anything differently?
We did a summer version on 19 August which hasn’t been evaluated fully yet due to many other urgents since. A hot debrief suggested we took on board our learning points, but that having a full team to do execute the whole day is necessary. We did different aspects of the service this time, so we involved call handlers again and a ride out on an ambulance, but also went to Training, Fleet, and followed a community first responder. We had enhanced graphics to use on the day as well, which was a nice bonus.
Want to know more?
Contact Joy Hale or call 07702 718815