Communicating Through the Cost of Living Crisis: A Halfway Review of Our External Strategy
Our 2023–2025 External Communications Strategy was created to focus our messaging through the cost of living crisis, helping us to reach our organisational goal of supporting more people and meeting more demand while demonstrating our impact across Greater Manchester.
We’re now halfway through delivering our strategy, which feels like a good time to reflect on our progress so far, make any adjustments and ensure our strategy is still effective and aligned with our wider organisational goals as we head into 2024!
When creating our strategy we identified 3 key objectives to focus on and assigned ambitious, specific and measurable targets to reach by 2025.
Let’s see how we’re doing so far….
Objective 1- Increase brand awareness, reaching and engaging with a wider audience
Target- Increase social media engagement from 800 to 1,500 per month
This year we have averaged 3,539 social media engagements a month, well over double our 2025 target. We’ve achieved this by focusing more on community building across our social media channels- engaging in conversations in Facebook community groups, utilising social media polls to engage our audiences and producing more authentic behind-the-scenes content to connect and build trust in Citizens Advice SORT Group.
Target- To average 20,000 social media impressions each month
Throughout this year we have averaged 59,345 monthly impressions, well over double our 2025 target.
We achieved this by tailoring our content to different audiences, growing our community organically through engaging with local community groups and developing our own social media advertising skills so we could effectively target key audiences with relevant content.
Target- Grow social media followers/audience by 2025 from 10,376 to 13,000
We have grown our social media audience throughout this year by 1,635 to 12,011, and we’re on track to reach our target by 2025.
Objective 2- Provide more self-help and online services
Target- Increase in visits to our self-help webpage from 1,500 to 2,000 a month
This has proved to be a challenging target to reach, and we’re currently averaging 1,825 visits a month. We’ve used targeted ads to signpost and created new online content linking to our self-help pages, but as much of our strategy focuses on providing very targeted support, linking to specific advice content on our national Citizens Advice website is often more helpful to our audiences.
Target- Increase in views of YouTube self-help videos, aiming for 2,000 channel views per month
This year we’ve averaged 1,573 channel views per month. The target of 2,000 has been hard to reach, partly because we haven’t had the team resources to create new advice video content to promote, and partly because of challenges we’ve faced with Meta blocking our video ad content.
Objective 3- Demonstrate our impact on the cost of living to external stakeholders
Some of the ways we can measure our impact are through the delivery of our Research and Campaigns plan, through our media coverage and our external newsletter engagement.
So far this year we have achieved over 100 pieces of media coverage across Greater Manchester, almost a 50% increase from the previous year, and we have increased our external newsletter subscribers from 554 to 686 since January.
Through our research and campaign activity, we’ve engaged with our local MPs and councillors around issues including the rise in S21 evictions and damp in rented accommodation. This engagement has helped to raise awareness of our advocacy work and increase our influence across Greater Manchester.
What's next?
Based on our progress and results so far, we’ll review and adjust our targets to ensure they’re still relevant and effective in helping us reach our key objectives, and that our team feels motivated to implement the strategy through the coming year!
