Gedling Borough Council – customer insight through engagement – The ‘Gedling Conversation’

The challenge

As a council, we have always invested in customer insight. A few years ago we also introduced a more robust process for analysing the content of residents’ letters, complaints and compliments to better understand the issues affecting our communities. We also run a biennial residents’ satisfaction survey that we host online and post to every home in the borough. This data is hugely important for developing our strategies and understanding what our residents think and need, but we wanted to develop this work further and create more opportunities for face-to-face communication. We felt that this would not only allow us to have more nuanced and detailed conversations with local people, it would also help our employees who don’t necessarily work directly with residents to talk to people about how they use our services and what could be improved. Our ultimate objective was to increase resident satisfaction with the council and helped our employees to live up to our corporate vision of ‘serving people – improving lives’.

The solution

We decided to create ‘The Gedling Conversation’ – an annual consultative campaign that we now run between June and July each year - to provide opportunities for our service areas and residents to meet face-to-face. For a few years this work focused on bringing a ‘Gedling Conversation’ branded tent to a number of central points across the borough and staffing it with employees from across our service areas, our senior management team, and members. While the tent was up residents had the opportunity to speak directly to officers and politicians about life in Gedling - with no issues off limits. Where it was possible to answer questions immediately we did, and where we needed to find out more information to help address the concern or question we took people’s details and forwarded it to the correct departments – following up to ensure that it had been done. We promoted where the tents would be through our social media channels, press releases, and in our residents magazine and ensured that we hosted our roadshows in the areas with the high footfall. We also hosted a number of targeted focus groups for groups who have been underrepresented in our survey responses, specifically rural communities and young people.

In the past year we altered that approach in response to feedback from some of our more rural communities that it wasn’t always possible to get to central locations. Last year we arranged for officers from our senior management team and service areas to visit all of the wards in the borough, giving residents a more informal opportunity to discuss issues, raise concerns and meet our employees.

The impact

Embedding face-to face engagement as part of our customer insight programme has delivered a number of benefits. We received a lot of positive feedback from residents who said they valued the opportunity to meet staff (many of whom they hadn’t come into contact with before) and many said that discussing their issues also helped them to understand the priorities of the councils more fully. The Gedling Conversation has also had a direct impact on the level of responses we now receive to our resident satisfaction survey. Before we implemented the campaign we achieved between 200-300 responses. When we introduced the first phase of the Gedling Conversation, using our branded tents, we saw this increase to around 2,500 responses. When we added ward visits to the campaign this we saw this increase to 3,422 responses.

This approach also had the added benefit of helping our service areas to think in a more customer-focused way. Each of the officers who visited the wards in the borough wrote up a summary of the key issues that were raised and these were fed back to the service leads for the relevant area. This information was used to help inform service planning sessions which took place in the autumn, helping us to make sure our plans were rooted in insight and giving our employees a great opportunity to speak to the people directly using or affected by their services.

Why it worked / how we’re sustaining it

The success of this approach lay in the fact that it offered our communities another way to engage with us. We already use lots of methods of communicating with them and canvassing their views, but this provided more informal chances to discuss issues in detail and meet the people responsible for different services within the council. Crucially, it helped local people to see and meet real people from across the organisation, which helps to build relationships and confidence in Gedling Borough Council as an organisation. It was also successful because it had the support of our chief executive, leader and service managers across the organisation. As the sole customer insight officer, I would not have been able to cover the ground we did on my own. Involving a wide range of senior people ensured the Gedling Conversation events happened on time, reached a wide range of people and was used to inform our service planning.

We fully intend to keep this work going and will keep thinking about how we can develop the Gedling Conversation in the future. For example, we’re exploring whether we can make greater use of digital technologies to better engage working people in the conversation.

Lessons learned

It is important to keep evolving the format of face-to-face engagement activities to make sure you can reach as many people as possible. It’s also vital to supplement this work with other communication channels to promote where people can have their say and reach different groups. We also learnt that insight can be gathered without huge resources. Activities like this are possible within existing resources if they are planned, coordinated and supported by senior offices and members.

Want to know more?

For more information please contact Natasha Radovanovic, customer insight officer at Gedling Borough Council.