Our Senior Communications and Engagement managers, Sara Price and Julia Stackhouse, were invited to speak at the Granicus GovCommunity Live Conference 2022 held on 15 November 2022. During our talk, we showcased how we listen to, reach and inform our communities using the Granicus communications platform to reach our target audiences.  

We commissioned Granicus’ engagement platform ‘Join the Conversation,’ which uses Engagement HQ, in 2020 to support our work with customers. Due to the range of engagement activities delivered within our communications and engagement consultancy team, we were asked to take part in the ‘Best practices to listen, reach and inform your communities’ session at the GovCommunity conference.

The audience for the event was predominantly local authorities, but there was attendance from a variety of housing associations, Transport for London, Integrated Care Systems and The Consultation Institute.  

By the nature of covering the whole of the South of England, we were well placed to be able to demonstrate the work we have done in national, regional, ICS and local engagement. However, more importantly, we were also able to demonstrate that engagement is not just a survey and the importance of understanding your audience.  

Using the tools within ‘Join the Conversation’ solution, we also demonstrated closed engagement for staff development, engagement to support multi-agency networking, idea generation, discussion and debate, as well as formal consultation and insight gathering.

We demonstrated a breadth of experience with a wide range of NHS and public sector organisations, our ability to understand the customer’s needs, priorities, goals and outcomes, and how our tailored engagement platform ‘Join the Conversation’ helps us to support the customer projects.

We were also invited to be part of a panel discussion about the challenges and opportunities facing the public sector in the next five years. We were able to contribute a broad perspective on the challenges facing the public sector, touching on the crisis in the workforce, demand for services and addressing health inequalities and equity of engagement and service delivery. Further, we described opportunities in the technology field to streamline our services, upskill our staff and use technologies such as ‘Join the Conversation’ and GovDelivery to reach our public, staff and users of services in a way that we have perhaps not done in the past. 

We have a huge opportunity to build on our fantastic business intelligence and digital services and combine that rich insight from the qualitative services offered in comms and engagement to provide a more rounded picture of ‘why’ to our customers.  Not just answering the ‘why’ questions to ICS challenges but also the ‘so what’ question. Moving forward, we could do this co-productively and collaboratively with patients, public and local systems.

Let’s not just provide the building blocks, let’s tell the story, the background and the future, as well.

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