How City of Doncaster Council improved communications with audience segmentation

While it only received official status in recent years, Doncaster has long been considered what Nick Fromont, the council’s Digital Communications Business Partner, calls “a place of places.”

“Before we were a city, we were one of the biggest boroughs in the country,” he added of the South Yorkshire settlement, which at 568 square kilometres is the country’s largest metropolitan district by area.

With such a large area encompassing a number of communities, communicating to the population of City of Doncaster Council requires a targeted understanding of each of the individual towns within the area.

“A lot of the time we’re trying to reach very different communities with different messages, even sometimes within a five-minute drive of each other,” Fromont said. “The residents in those communities sometimes feel like they’re not much to do with each other. It’s not that they don’t feel like part of Doncaster, but they’re definitely proud of their town/village, whatever it might be, and they really feel like part of that community rather than a wider thing.”

While that individuality can make for entertaining sports rivalries, it can create struggles when communicating during times of emergency, as Fromont’s team found out during a 2019 storm that resulted in severe flooding in the area.

“We were the worst hit basically in the UK,” he recalled. “So much so that we got a visit from then, Prince Charles, to come and see how the community had been impacted even a month later.”

Both during the storm and in the clean-up efforts that followed, Fromont said that the communications team relied mostly on social media to communicate with their residents digitally. While it helped gain exposure initially, the team soon found that the broad messaging through social media channels was not connecting with community residents.

“It was great when it first started,” Fromont said. “Those first few days where basically everyone’s impacted in some way, our messages were being seen millions of times because everyone was interested. But a week later, when there’s only certain areas that are still impacted by it, or those residents who’ve had to leave their homes, they’re still interested but everyone else has kind of moved on. That became a real problem with us, communicating with those residents who really needed the information.”

Left with only the broad audience approach of social media, Fromont wasn’t sure that targeted messaging was having the impact that they sought and led to negative feedback both on social media and to the overall response from the council after the storm.

“It kind of muddied the waters a little bit,” he said. “People could comment on our social media posts. They could have their say, even though it didn’t impact them at all and they didn’t have all the information. And that created problems that didn’t help.”

Shortly after the floods, City of Doncaster Council integrated a new digital tool into their communications: govDelivery. Fromont noted the implementation of the govDelivery system hit at an equally, if not more auspicious moment in time: February 2020.

“Our first email was sent in April and then we never looked back,” he said. “COVID updates and various communications of key messages that kept us pretty busy.”

Early on, Fromont found that the audience segmentation features of govDelivery helped his team better target their communications to audiences based on interests. By broadcasting general messages around news and sending reminders, Fromont said that the team was then able to encourage their audience to sign up for more detailed topic channels to adjust the level of information they want to receive from the city.

“Then when something related to that topic happens, we send out a reminder regarding, say, flooding, and mention that they can also sign up for the emergency planning list,” said Fromont. “That’s a bit more detailed. People can sign up for it here or change their subscription preferences as they see fit to be on or off a particular mailing list.”

The approach proved successful over the next four years, with topics such as the Emergency Planning list growing to 15,000 subscribers, Fromont said. Then, in October 2023, the city faced another weather-related stress test when Storm Babet brought flooding to more than 1,000 homes in England, hitting the South Yorkshire area particularly hard.

This time around, Fromont’s team had both social media and the Emergency Planning mailing list through govDelivery to help convey vital information before, during, and after the storm.

“When we first knew it was going to hit, we used both channels (email and social media) because we knew we were going to be able to broadcast through social media but also knew that we were reaching as many Doncaster residents as we could directly through the mailing list,” Fromont said. “The emails were amazing. Loads of people opening them up.”

One reason Fromont believed the segmented email messaging was having more of an impact than social media was due to bypassing social media algorithms that would otherwise hurt the nature of City of Doncaster Council’s messaging.

“Social media platforms now don’t push anything that has a web link in it,” he said. “Obviously, we were trying to get people to look at our web pages that had more information than we could give them. Or, if they needed more information because they’ve been impacted, they could connect to our web pages. And social media just isn’t great for that anymore because it obviously wants to keep them on Facebook, not direct them away via a link.”

By contrast, he added, govDelivery helped make the connection to important information more readily visible to subscribers and easier to find, which internal tracking software tools helped his team see in real time.

“[govDelivery] was amazing for that,” Fromont said. “It meant that people were able to find that information. But it also meant that we knew people were finding it and were engaging with the content. We knew people were interested and we could keep those pages up to date.”

Where Fromont said he really saw the difference was in the days after the storm, when information turned away from news and toward helping individual towns and villages recover from flooding.

Just as with 2019’s storm, it was important to get targeted information to specific audiences.

“That was really key for us because, unlike 2019, people just weren’t as interested because the storm wasn’t as bad,” Fromont said. “So, it wasn’t as big on social media. But it’s obviously still of interest to you if your living room is under a foot of water. You want to know what’s happening, what we’re doing as a council, and what can be done, what you need to do. So, we were able to really specifically target those residents and areas that had been impacted.”

“When residents sign up to our mailing list, we ask them which village/town in Doncaster they live in. We’ve then segmented these audiences, so we were able to just target residents of a certain village with important updates if we needed to”.

Compared to 2019, when Fromont said communities teams were reduced to door knocking at times, the 2023 storm recovery benefited from having a strong email communication list of 120,000 residents in place.

“Obviously not everyone in those villages was on those mailing lists,” he said of the 310,000 total residents in Doncaster. “But enough people were able to get that information and then forward it on to neighbours or get that information to them. So, audience segmentation has been really, really key for us as a ‘place of places’ that communicates a little bit differently with various areas. It offers that more personalized touch of residents understanding that you’re talking about their village or you’re interested in what’s impacting them specifically. That we’re not just trying to share ‘catch-all’ messages. It was perfect for this situation.”

The impact of the segmented approach to communications related to Storm Babet could be seen both during and after the storm.

With an average open rate of 47%, the City of Doncaster Council saw more than 7,000 visits to Storm Babet-related webpages in the days surrounding the storm. Of even more interest to Fromont was the increase in newsletter open rates that were localized to specific towns and villages, reaching a nearly 60% open rate compared to the 40% open rate of emails with Doncaster-wide messaging.

Compared to the communications response in 2019, Fromont said the Babet response was significant.

“In 2019 we did get a lot of criticism,” he said. “Even though we were doing a lot in response, it was felt by some residents that it wasn’t quite enough, or we weren’t meeting specific needs. [The segmented messaging strategy] was great in the fact that we could show exactly what we’re doing. ‘So, this is our response. This is what we’re doing in your area. These are the plans for the next two days. If you need this, if you need that then here’s who to contact.’ As a result, the negativity around us as a council really went down.”

The response was so popular, Fromont said he saw other local authorities being tagged into City of Doncaster Council’s messaging as an example of how to effectively communicate during the storm.

“We were starting to get tagged into things aimed at other local authorities on social media saying, ‘Why can’t you be more like City of Doncaster Council keeping us up to date with stuff?’ Which was great to see and showed that we obviously learned our lessons from 2019.”

In the days after the storm, City of Doncaster Council kept up a steady cadence of messaging even if, as Fromont put it, “we didn’t have that much to say.”

“It was about building trust. It’s to the point now, and I know it sounds silly,” he added, “but I think the emails are more trusted than social media, because it’s just you and that message. There’s no one else clouding opinion with comments underneath, saying it’s a load of rubbish, or whatever. it’s just coming straight to you as a resident from City of Doncaster Council.”

In the months since the storm, Fromont said the relationships remain positive with an increase in locality-specific subscriptions. By understanding the interests of the community and giving them a way to receive targeted information, Fromont hopes the power of segmentation will be even stronger when the next weather-related crisis hits Doncaster.

“When the next time comes, we know we’ve got a bit of a cross section of our audience to reach them as best we can,” he said. “They might not be signed up to the emergency planning mailing list, but they might be signed up to our news updates and hopefully they’ve told us which village they live in. So, we’ve got 90,000 residents on that mailing list and a way of reaching them with targeted updates.

“Before, it was just kind of hit and hope with social media,” he added. “But now, with segmented messaging, you can understand a lot more about what’s working, what isn’t. You can delve a bit deeper and really reach people with the messages that matter to them.”