Unawards 2016 winner – Best Small Communications Team – South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service

Like many public sector communication teams our numbers have reduced over the past few years. In many ways we have been fortunate as this has been done by natural attrition rather than redundancy, but it still presents a challenge to our way of working, especially given the vital community safety role that the fire service plays. We needed to find a way of continuing to produce campaigns that save people’s lives, while also making sure that we could balance those demands with the budget and resources at our disposal.

The plan

A key part of our approach was to take a step back and look at our organisation’s business objectives. The mission of the South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service is making people safer, specifically changing people’s behaviour to make them less likely to have fires in the first place. We decided to use that as the basis for planning and prioritising activities and made sure that we focused on delivering the things that best supported those plans, through the channels that were most effective for reaching our different audiences. We also recognised that we needed to increase our focus on internal communications as our employees are based across multiple sites and don’t always have lots of access to communications channels. We wanted to increase our work to share information across the organisation and encourage people to talk to each other more openly and regularly, which isn’t only good for staff engagement, but also helps to fill the gap created by having fewer dedicated communications employees.

The execution

We spent some time looking at our analytics to see how our audiences were using our channels. This helped us to understand where people looked for different types of information and meant that we could be more selective in which channels we used for different messages – a much more practical approach when you only have limited numbers in your team. We discovered for instance that our Twitter account really triumphed during emergency incidents, whereas our Facebook pages were much more effective for sharing our campaign messages. We repurpose our content across platforms where possible, but this knowledge helps us to prioritise where to direct our content for the greatest impact.

We created an annual campaign plan which outlined a number of campaigns that aligned with the priorities for the wider business. We made sure that we spent time sharing these messages with our local media who are influential and widely read by our local residents, to help broaden the reach. We created a weekly grid and held regular team meetings to discuss opportunities for more proactive messaging, and outsourced a lot of our design work to South Yorkshire Police to ensure that we could maintain high design standards despite not having an in-house graphics function. From an internal communications perspective we invested time and money into creating channels that would help employees to see our messages and communicate with each other, including digital screens and a Yammer platform. We also worked closely with teams across the organisation to support them to communicate more effectively with their staff.

The impact

We’ve seen some great results. Our more proactive, campaigns-based approach has seen the percentage of positive or neutral stories reported about the service reach 95 per cent. We have increased traffic to our website by nearly 65 per cent and our Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels are consistently in the top five of the most followed UK Fire and Rescue Service accounts per head of local population. Our Yammer platform has seen a 38 per cent increase in active users in the last year alone and our recent electrical safety campaign actually helped to reduce house fires by 27 per cent, illustrating that as a function we’re directly contributing to the organisation’s community safety objectives.

Why it worked

A key part of our success has been the support we have had from our senior teams and close working relationship that we’ve developed over the past few years. We are kept well informed about what is happening across the organisations, or the challenges we need to overcome which helps us to deliver campaigns that really meet the organisation’s needs. Although we have a key tactical function to plan the organisation recognises that we are also a strategic service which helps us to prioritise working on the issues that will have the greatest impact. We’ve also spent time looking at our data and what the evidence tells us to make sure that we’re using our channels to best effect. That has helped us to spend time on the right things rather than wasting hours on messages that might not reach people in the way we need them too.

Lessons learned

Although all departments would like more people and more money this way of working has illustrated that it really isn’t the size of the team that is the most important thing. It’s much more important to have the right structure in place, develop evidence-lead channels and spend time fostering relationships with your wider organisation to make sure that you’re in the loop with what is happening. This will put your team in a much better position to drive communications rather than reacting to requests from service areas.

Want to know more?

For more information please contact Alex Mills.