Nottinghamshire County Council improved resident satisfaction with council services as a result of implementing a new email system in October 2013.
With more than 100 different logos and a plethora of communications leaflets, the council decided it needed to reign in its marketing efforts to present a more consistent, sustainable and effective identity to its stakeholders.
The council was managing many communication silos and different databases across departments that were not updated or used frequently.
By digitising the content in its leaflets and consolidating its marketing efforts under one logo and email marketing system, the council was able to focus on a more targeted approach.
The council promotes email sign-ups on its social media channels and across its website. It has also used an overlay box that pops up for visitors on key pages of the website – when in use this helped the council to double the daily amount of people signing up to the service.
Martin Done, Service Director of Communications, said: "People felt much more informed than they had before despite the fact we cut down on a lot of leaflets and the amount that we were printing. The actual number of people who felt informed increased because we introduced a much more targeted way of delivering communications."
Resident satisfaction has increased by 23 percentage points to 63 per cent as a result of email communications, during a time when the council was delivering £100m in cuts in council services.
Feedback from residents has included: "I can check the news on my smartphone on the go," "It provides information directly to your inbox about topics you are interested in," "I don't have to trawl the website to find info – I get it straight to my inbox" and "It saves hanging on a phone line".
Today, Nottinghamshire has 53,000 subscribers to their email service which represents a 70 per cent increase in subscribers for the past year.