Four Tips For Creating A Municipal Communications Program

By Cass Bergemann and Maddie Krebs

Your community wants to hear from you! The best approach? Proactive communications. Residents are looking to you as their source of truth, about everything from projects in their neighborhoods to how their tax dollars are being used, issues facing the community and what great things are happening right in their backyard. 

However, establishing and maintaining a communications program can be a challenge for many municipalities, given strained staffing and resources. At the same time, municipalities recognize how critically important it is to do so effectively. Strong, proactive communications can offer transparency to your operations and increase trust. Here are four tips to create a strong program that engages and informs your residents.  

ASSESS THE CURRENT STATE OF YOUR COMMUNICATIONS

You may be wondering, where do I start? To create a cohesive communications program, it’s important to know what your communication with residents looks like now. What information is on your website? Are you active on social media? Do you have a newsletter for residents?

After getting the lay of the land, think about how you can evolve your communications to fit your community’s needs. What do residents want to know about? What unique needs do they have? Where do they typically go for information? We recommend creating a survey for residents to better understand how they currently engage with the City, what information is most important to them and how they prefer to receive information. From there, you can start building a program that meets the needs of your community and can be supported by your staff.

CONTENT IS KEY

Once you’re well-versed in what channels are available and opportunities for the future, create a plan for what content you can share. Creating a content strategy establishes the themes and types of content to use, informs how often content should be posted and establishes consistency for posts that align with your residents’ interests. For example, municipalities often post about:

• Proactive updates from each department, including new projects, 
• City council meetings and issues that will be discussed
• Events – including drug take-back days, recycling events, ribbon cuttings and holiday celebrations 
• Reminders – such as holiday closures, garbage pickup delays  
• Employee accomplishments, including awards, retirements and feel-good stories about the work they do every day 
• Awareness days/months 

We recommend organizing these posts into a content calendar for an at-a-glance look at what you’re communicating with your residents and when.

USE YOUR VOICE

In creating a communications program, always consider your “voice” – or your communications personality. We recommend that any organization with a social media platform takes the time to consider what brand voice will resonate best with your audiences and what tools are in place to make sure that the posts and profiles are consistent with your brand standards, regardless of who is posting to your platforms. Most municipalities’ voices are straightforward, factual and informative, but some like to be more playful. The playful approach can encourage deeper engagement but also requires closer upkeep to make sure it doesn’t veer too far to become inappropriate.

LEVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA 

Social media is a large investment of time and energy for municipalities, made even more challenging by the partisan divide, the rise of misinformation and managing channels with limited resources. So why do it? It’s an incredibly powerful tool for communicating, connecting and engaging with your constituents; social media’s reach today is greater than ever. 

It’s important to have an established approach and policy for managing your social media channels. Information provided on social media should convey the official position of the municipality as an entity or represent its views on a particular topic. Anyone acting on behalf of a municipality on social media must consider the following:

• Am I logged into the proper platform and not on my personal account?
• What am I authorized to comment on?
• What messaging is prepared in advance for me to use for key topics or issues?
• What internal rules or policies must apply to my response?

When handling negative comments, it’s important to not react emotionally in your response. Before responding, take a step back and think critically about the effect of the comment and how it could be perceived by your audience. Consider the following approach:

• Acknowledge the commenter.
• Correct the situation and share relevant information or links.
• If escalated, move the conversation off of the public post to DM or email.
• If the comment is vulgar or defamatory, consider hiding it, but make sure you never delete it!

Municipalities across Wisconsin have chosen to partner with Mueller Communications to help them determine the best way to reach their residents and the capabilities of their staff to do so. This often takes the form of a communications audit, the creation of a community survey and interviews with municipal leadership.