John-Paul Danon of CAN on how collaboration can save you time and budget
CommsCamp is something we at CAN have supported for years now. The “no agenda” concept behind the event means it is a genuinely different experience from other comms gatherings as it’s wholly shaped by participants.
You have no idea what is going to happen on the day – but the attendees and volunteers make something special happen every time.
CAN sponsored the inaugural CommsCamp Scotland in Glasgow two years ago – where we found our Lead for Scotland Leanne Hughes – as well as previous CommsCamps in the Midlands and North of England.
We think comms teams coming together to share insight is the public sector’s superpower. Unlike in the private sector, exchanging knowledge and ideas saves everyone precious time and public money from otherwise having to continually reinvent the wheel.
Collaboration opportunities
For the past 18 months we’ve been running free in-person collaboration days around the UK. Like with CommsCamp, these events bring people together who work in the public sector in the same region but for different types of organisations to share and build on ideas.
We brainstorm ways forward on how to engage with specific audiences or on common themes that cut across the public sector – NHS, local authorities, combined authorities, police, fire and rescue, and colleges. At the end of the day, participants come away with a solid plan of action to take back to senior management.
CAN also runs free online “hubs” for public sector comms with regular free learning webinars. The Public Health Comms Hub is for you if you run public health campaigns in health boards and councils. The Blue Light Comms Hub is for police and fire and rescue comms folk and council communicators who partner with them on campaigns.
The Fostering Recruitment Hub is our longest running online community and has more than 800 members. It’s UK-wide, and Leanne has recently started to host webinars tailored specifically to Scottish councils.
Better value
The reason the team at CAN are driven to support and enable collaboration is because we believe that public sector comms folk can get much better results and value for their advertising spend.
There is far too much public money – and your time – being wasted on expensive media that isn’t sufficiently targeted to audiences and certainly isn’t measurable in any meaningful way.
Yet, it’s more important than ever that comms professionals in the public sector can demonstrate impact and value from their campaigns.
These are the areas we can help you with:
- Lowest cost-per-outcome online paid media. Using tested tactics that make a real difference to campaign outcomes like programmatic advertising (real-time bidding), Google Search profiling, specific audience segmentation, and optimisation of best-performing channels and creatives.
- Improving user experience and interaction. Clear campaign landing pages based on content design principles, advertising tech that tells you if someone completes your call to action and remarkets to them if they don’t, and accessible and inclusive content expertise.
- Unlocking budget and savings from owned channels. Facilitating improved advertising opportunities for your organisation’s media assets like website, print, email and out-of-home.
If any of this sounds useful, please feel free to chat with me, Leanne and our colleagues Matt and Dan at CommsCamp. We’ll probably be hanging around the cake table with intent!
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