Are You Ready For a Return to Normalcy?
During the Pandemic, municipalities’ communication plans were based around getting news to residents efficiently and timely.The COVID 19 pandemic produced mass amounts of news on a daily basis. Life revolved around the pandemic and communication with residents was extremely important, but had drastically changed course from the normal day to day news of recreational activities, park updates and other municipal news.
Now that things are starting to return a little bit back to normal it is important to reassess your communication strategy. How are you keeping your residents engaged? We’re sure your residents are happy to have live recreational events, public planning meetings, and children’s events back on the calendar. How are you driving attendance to these events? It can be challenging to reinvigorate residents after so many months. We offer these tips to make sure your well planned event is successful:
- Always post events to your municipal website calendar – use department categories if they are available (recreation, committee/commission, council/board, planning)
- Make sure you include ALL the details and use website forms for RSVP’s where needed
- Include municipal events in your residential newsletter(s)
- Post to social media early and often about your events. If resident participation is extremely important, consider boosting a Facebook post. Facebook boosts aren’t necessarily expensive. You set the budget. We recommend the following parameters for a municipal Facebook boosted post
- $50 to $75 lifetime budget for the boost
- Run the boost for at least 5 days
- The audience should be your municipality +5 to 10 miles
Your residents are looking forward to participating in community events again. It is important for municipalities to reach them where they are using all channels available (website, social media, newsletters). For all municipalities it is a joy to be bringing the community together and you can spread that joy by making sure that the news gets out.
