The Community Council Project has grown a network of community councils on Twitter through online events and encouraging CCs to interact with each other.
Through the use of Twitter, the Improvement Service is able to connect directly with community councillors and relevant partners and has created a valuable space for sharing knowledge and good practice.
The challenge
The Improvement Service and Scottish Government’s joint project supporting community councils started in December 2013. Among the key deliverables for the project are requirements to use social media to create networking opportunities and highlight the value of the community councils website and other information channel, and to engage with community councils to develop case studies and other website content.
There are over 1,200 active community councils across Scotland and the Improvement Service does not have the resources to contact and interact with every community council in person. The geographic spread of community councils also means that community councils themselves do not have a lot of opportunity to get to know other community councils.
Actions/approach
The Community Councils Project Twitter account, @ScottishCCs, was set up in August 2015. The Improvement Service had looked into the online presences of community councils and therefore had a list of community councils with Twitter profiles. @ScottishCCs followed all the known community councils on Twitter as well as other relevant organisations working in the community and public sectors.
The Twitter account is used to highlight new content on www.communitycouncils.scot, including events, news, and guidance. When a community council follows @ScottishCCs, we tweet them to thank them for following us and this shows that the account is active and that it is being run by real people.
We noticed through our contact with CCLOs and community councils that community councils across Scotland were facing similar challenges, such as retaining members and engaging with the community. While many community councils were doing work to overcome these issues, there wasn’t always a place for community councils to share ideas and ask each other questions and get quick responses. With this in mind, we decided to run our first Twitter Hour in November 2016.
Twitter Hours are online events where at a set date and time, people answer a series of pre-set questions. We used KHub groups, Twitter, the Community Councils website and newsletter, and CCLOs to advertise the event. Read the round up of the first Twitter Hour.
After the success of the first Twitter Hour we held a second in March 2017. This time we asked questions on the theme of community engagement because this had been mentioned throughout the previous online event. Read about the Community Engagement Twitter Hour.
In September 2018 we hosted a Twitter Hour to help community councils contribute to Scottish Government and COSLA’s Democracy Matters Conversation, which in turn would feed into the Local Governance Review. Read about the Democracy Matters Twitter Hour.
Outwith formal pre-planned Twitter events, we also ask community councils to share the experience on different topics in adhoc conversations. For example, during 2018, Year of Young People, we asked community councils to share their experience of involving young people in community council work. We collated the interactions to create a summary of the discussions for the website.
Impact and results
The Twitter events have been well attended and valued by community councillors.
#ScottishCCs where have we got this hour? More followers, some info & things to follow up.
The events have helped to develop a network of community councils across Scotland. For example, Cromarty Community Council, in Highland, participated in one of the hours and is now followed by Renfrew CC (in Renfrewshire) as well as several other local authority’s CCs such as Leith Links (in Edinburgh) and Scotstoun (in Glasgow). This has allowed CCs to network the country.
Through Twitter we have also been able to curate and source content for the Scottish Community Councils website. For example, Musselburgh and Inveresk CC mentioned their Citizen of the Year Award and we contacted them directly through Twitter to write a piece for the website.
Through the online events and informal discussions, community councils and relevant partners are able to share anecdotes and tips quickly and openly. The @ScottishCCs Twitter account plays an important role in this by facilitating and summarising discussions for the Community Councils website, which means that knowledge is stored that might have just been lost.
How is the new approach being sustained?
Continuing to engage with CCs by following all the CCs that we know are on Twitter and interacting with them
Twitter remains an important part of the Improvement Service’s Community Councils Project and we continue to use to engage with community councils. This includes continuing to follow all the community councils that are on Twitter and starting conversations when we notice a topic that community councils are interested in.
Lessons learned
Twitter is fast-paced so when there are a lot of participants it can be difficult to keep track of responses and interact with everyone. To resolve this we scheduled tweets in advance, such as the questions set for the hour in five minute intervals, and we had two people monitoring and interacting with responses to make sure nothing was missed.
Tweets have a character limited so responses have to be short. This can make answering complex questions difficult. The Democracy Matters Twitter Hour used questions from the Local Governance Review conversation but on reflection these needed a little more space for participants to answer fully. While this Twitter Hour was active and informative, we learned that some topics are better suited for this format than others.
Not all community councils use Twitter, so we allowed community councils to input the online events by emailing their responses directly.
Next steps
We aim to do an official Twitter Hour once a year on a topic of interest to CCs such as participatory budgeting, digital engagement, community engagement etc.