Unawards 2016 winner – Best use of email – Central Bedfordshire Council

Since Central Bedfordshire was established as a unitary council in 2009 our residents’ magazine, News Central, has been an important source of news and information. It started as a monthly publication, to help our communities understand how the new council would operate and clarify any confusion about changes that had taken place. As time went by producing a monthly publication was becoming increasingly time consuming and resource intensive. Printing a copy for each household was also extremely expensive. We had started to reduce the number of issues we produced each year but we wanted to explore whether we could move to a wholly online method of communication, giving resident’s greater flexibility about the news they got and hopefully, save money.

The plan and execution

We started by conducting thorough research. One of the arguments against moving to an online bulletin had been that older readers didn’t use digital channels, so we began by testing this theory. Our research showed that 94 per cent of our older residents used technology to keep in touch with friends and family, showing that digital exclusion was far less of a problem than first thought.

We already had a strong social media following and used electronic bulletins for some e-marketing activities, so we also surveyed that audience to find out what they liked about our e-marketing and what they would want from a residents’ publication. The results were overwhelmingly in favour of more local news. This was extremely informative as our bulletins had always been structured thematically but our audience was telling us that geographical updates would be far more useful.

We collated our findings and began work to engage our internal stakeholders, particularly our leadership team and members, who had been particularly fond of the magazine. We explained the insight that we had got from our research and proposed creating a new e-bulletin which would be divided into four geographical areas – north, east, south and west. To ensure a good spread of service news in each bulletin we would ensure that each area included a leisure centre, market town, library, tidy tip, highways information and a countryside tourism site.

We also guided our internal stakeholders through a carefully planned launch programme which would use our existing channels to informed residents that the magazine would be moving to a digital format. This helped to reassure them that the high engagement figures we had accumulated with the magazine over the past few years would not be at risk. We also committed to producing one hard copy publication a year which would be sent out with the annual council tax updates, so that residents who liked a paper copy would still receive something.

Our senior leaders approved our plans and we began several months of activity to prepare residents for the changes. We decided to call the new bulleting News Central Plus, so that the product felt familiar to readers of News Central. We encouraged residents already registered to our e-marketing bulletins to sign up for the new email alerts. We promoted the new bulletin on our other digital channels and in the final issues of our residents’ magazine. We also created a pop up alert to help people immediately sign up to the alert from our website.

The impact

We launched News Central Plus in November 2015 and within 12 months we had attracted 10,000 more subscribers. This didn’t include the people who were already receiving our other e-bulletins who also chose to opt in to the service. Our statistics showed that our open rates averaged at 36 per cent, more than 10 per cent higher that previous bulletin open rates had registered. Some issues have even had an open rate as high as 64 per cent.

We followed up the digital data with a resident satisfaction survey in 2016 which revealed that 76 per cent of residents were satisfied with the publication. An added benefit was that moving to an online format meant that we no longer had any production or print costs, saving approximately £40,000 a year.

Why it worked

We invested significant time in researching and understanding what residents wanted to read about, which meant that we were able to tailor messages to suit our audiences’ needs, rather than what we thought they wanted to read about. The new bulletins also allow us to get updates out to residents immediately, rather than waiting for the next News Central print run. This is enormously helpful when we need to get quick messages out to our communities, such as when we needed to tell residents in a specific area about a gas outage that would impact on them. News Central Plus helped us to focus our messaging on that specific group of people without alienating the rest of our audience. Another benefit to using this new system is that it has helped to streamline our communications activities as many of our media contacts also subscribe to the service.

Lessons learned

We had an interesting challenge when it came to deciding on the local areas for our new updates. Geographically our area is very rural with 11 market towns across the area so there wasn’t an obvious answer. We know we couldn’t go down to town level – we didn’t have the capacity or the enough news at this hyper local level, plus this would have upset residents living in the smaller villages. So we had to find a manageable approach but one that was meaningful to residents too.

We decided to go for four areas: north, south, east and west. The logic of splitting into four areas ensured that they all had key services in each area (e.g. tidy tip, library and leisure centre) this means we have a constant flow of news. The approach seems to work. Some people on the boarders sign up for more than one area and some want everything so sign up for all four. 

The number of subscribers has gone up to over 47,000 now from 35,000 before the change and open and click through rates are better too.

Want to know more?

For more information please contact Alan Ferguson, web mManager, Central Bedfordshire Council.