Hi Josh here. New Admin Assistant for the Comms team. This week we kicked off our first Show and Tell of 2024. This is our opportunity, , once a month, as a Comms team to showcase our work to the rest of the organisation but also get feedback, and have a discussion about how and why we do things. For this session we took a deep dive into our online events and in particular our AI series and Lunch and Learns. We are generally pleased with the numbers and attendance rate vs registration (just shy of 50%). However, the team identified that the number of attendees from local authorities could be improved.
We posed the question to our colleagues of how we break out of our echo chamber; how we can reach an audience outside of our current mailing list. Elise provided an example from our Digital Sustainability event, which showed a high proportion of private sector attendees. Using Google Analytics, the team showed how LinkedIn is the third highest source of traffic to the CDPS website, and how this could be attributed to content posted by external panellists.
Our colleagues come up with some other great ideas for for how we can break out of the echo chamber, with an emphasis on LAs. Here are just a few of them:
We decided as a team that we would review these suggestions, decide which ones we can realistically take forward, and then provide an update on our progress in the next Show and Tell.
All in all it felt like an incredibly positive Show and Tell and just shows you that you don’t always need to try and find the answers on your own. On occasions we need to break out of our own silo and see what others can bring to the table.
Mike here! I’ve been busy working on our Events planner for 2024 for a good couple of months now and it’s been going really well. We have a great mix of online and in-person events coming up, supported by lots of new and engaging content. However, the same three questions kept on jabbing me in the ribs every time I added a new event to my digital roadmap:
The dreaded three W’s! But very important W’s that as a Comms Manager responsible for our events programme and budgets, I need to keep front and centre. Now if you came and asked me these three questions direct, I could roll off the answers as quick as a flash but it wouldn’t be so obvious if you landed on my original events planner. You would just see a long list of events with titles, dates and presenters.
So when I came back in January I threw my original planner in the virtual bin and came up with a different way to present it. I started by creating a column with all our strategic priorities and started connecting the dots with our events. And once I started doing that, it all started to take shape. Quite simply, if an event I had down on my planner didn’t meet a strategic priority it got kicked to the curb or virtual backlog. Designing the board in this way has immediately helped me with my decision making. Now I must admit it is quite the explosion of colours you see before you but once you understand the method behind my labelling madness, I really believe it will help staff, our senior leadership team and key stakeholders see the strategic value when it comes to our events.
