Yesterday evening I presented a review of the way Stockport Council does marketing and communications.  It’s been approved by the CRMG Scrutiny committee, which looks at the back-office functions at the Council, and next goes to the Executive.

The review, as with all scrutiny reviews, is a cross-party one and councillors O’Neill, Scott, Wyatt and Stuart Corris were also on the panel, taking evidence from a range of sources both inside and outside the council.

We aim to do two things.

Firstly, to reduce the amount the Council spends on communications, and secondly to improve those communications.

How can we do both?

For the last few years Stockport’s had devolved budgets.  That has many advantages in empowering officers to spend money as effectively as they can, with their on-the-ground knowledge.  But analysis has shown that a lot of people who aren’t communications specialists have been spending money on leaflets, websites, adverts etc. that, whilst well-meaning, aren’t all providing good value for money.

We’re recommending that communications professionals be involved in all wider communications (not one-to-one like letters and phone calls, but leaflets, websites etc.).  You wouldn’t want me fixing your potholes – you want someone trained to do it, and the same goes for producing effective communications that actually do the job.

There are various suggestions we’ve come up with around that theme including:

• bringing all Council web communications under the main Stockport website.  In the past, people have sometimes set up separate websites, which may have made sense at the time but isn’t needed now.  Bringing them under the stockport.gov.uk banner not only saves money, but makes it easy for people to find the information.
• ensuring the Council continues to push forward in using new technologies in addition to more traditional methods like leaflets.  Stockport already uses the website, Twitter, Facebook and digital TV (and probably more I’ve forgotten).  We’re suggesting that more use of mobile phone texting is investigated.  This is something many local schools are using very effectively, so we get a text message to let us know that a club’s been cancelled or anything else like that.  It’s a bit more complex for the Council to use, but worth investigating as a text message is many times cheaper than getting a leaflet through someone’s door.

Much of this is already happening, and I believe the Council will save hundreds of thousands of pounds each year and improve its communications by following this through.

You can read the report here – it starts on page 115.
(Note – there may be a couple of small tweaks before this goes to the Executive – nothing major).

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