By Vicky Croughan, Senior Communications Officer, South Hams District and West Devon Borough Councils
We all know that we need to engage effectively with our communities to help meet their local needs, but that is easier said than done when you’re in a rural county like Devon.
With an ever increasing aging population, inferior broadband connection in many areas, and in some districts, like the South Hams and West Devon, a population averaging around 0.5 people per football pitch-sized area. You get the idea of the challenges we face when communicating to our residents.
So, a new approach to consistent messaging with greater reach and the added bonus of saving us all time when working, was a key ambition. With eight district councils and a county council often sharing similarly themed messaging, we formed a communication’s group. Dartmoor National Park Authority’s comms came to join the fun too.
And the name? Well, the name affectionately given to most Devon council partnership work is, ‘Team Devon’, so forgive us for not being very inventive for a set of creative minds… but we became the ‘Team Devon Comms Group’.
Meeting every fortnight on a Wednesday for one hour, we share anything new. Our communication campaigns, any resources, IT knowledge, what’s on the horizon nationally, whether it’s elections or national funding we’re all dealing with, and we also discuss any challenges and opportunities we are facing.
Examples in the past have included sharing sea safety, litter and localised Covid campaigns and design collateral that any teams have created and then sharing it for others to use. We hold the occasional in-person meeting where we look at common goals, whether that be emergency planning focussing on comms needs and mutual support agreements, or a recent session which was a behaviour change workshop where we brainstormed local campaigns (a bit like a mini LGComms session!).
A popular theme is to share links to training and webinars, especially the free ones! Since the group formed about five years ago, we have been able to create an increasingly targeted, unified approach to messaging, using a multitude of our joint resources.
The result? Joint collaboration has saved us time and our messaging Devon-wide has greater consistency and amplification across all of our networks.
One of the most tangible benefits however, is we have created our own community of support and are no longer just colleagues but friends, meeting socially for get togethers throughout the year.
We’re a network of people who truly understand the challenges of our job and that is worth its weight in gold and our residents and communities can only benefit from this greater collaboration.