Featured in Policing Insight: what a social media playbook showed us about clarity

Policing Insight has published our article on a social media programme we delivered for the corporate communications team of a police force in England. You can read the full piece here: https://policinginsight.com/feature/opinion/social-media-in-policing-what-happens-when-you-focus-on-making-the-rules-clearer/

The programme started with a compliance requirement: the College of Policing’s Media and Communications Authorised Professional Practice (APP). The team’s leader chose to use it as an opportunity to involve the whole team in deciding how they wanted social media to work in practice, and that choice shaped everything that followed.

We began with an audit of 15 months of the force’s social media activity across all channels, led by Teamshaper associate Louise Bartlett, alongside platform analytics, benchmarking against other forces and a confidential questionnaire completed by the whole team. The picture was encouraging: an established audience, growth across most channels and positive sentiment around the content. The team had plenty of ideas and enthusiasm. What held new ideas back was uncertainty about the criteria behind sign-off decisions.

The team kept the oversight that police communications require and made the boundaries clearer, with a tiered approval matrix and documented criteria. In a full-day workshop, small groups took real content briefs from idea to finished piece and agreed what they wanted the force’s voice to sound like. Those decisions went into the playbook section by section over the following weeks, together with a platform skills matrix and a small set of performance indicators the team could track over time.

Four weeks after the workshop, the team’s average rating for how clear they were about how social media should work had risen by 32%. People were already using the playbook’s shared language to discuss whether new content had the right tone for its audience.

The article closes with questions any police communications team can ask of its own approach:

• Do people understand the criteria behind sign-off decisions?

• Does everyone mean the same thing when they talk about tone of voice?

• Is expertise shared or concentrated with a few individuals?

• Does the playbook reflect what people encounter when doing the job?

• Do the people expected to use it have a meaningful hand in shaping it?

• Does the team have an agreed way of measuring whether its approach is working?

If your team is developing or refreshing its social media playbook, you can find out more about our programme here.

The full case study can be seen here.