Success Story | Kirklees Council
How Council Impacted Public Well-Being With an Award-Winning Email Campaign
Can a council proactively impact public health by helping residents keep their New Year’s resolutions? During a time when the NHS and social care is under strain to provide support, Kirklees Council met the need through their ‘Resolution: Revolution’ email campaign. The result — supported by Granicus govDelivery — is not only inspiring but has also earned the team recognition, including a Granicus Digital Public Sector Award. See Kirklees Council’s presentation from Granicus 10th Annual Engagament Summit.
SITUATION
January can be bleak. The month brings Blue Monday, peaks in divorces and suicides, and the pressure to start a New Years’ resolution. Research states that 88% to 90% of British citizens who make a New Year’s resolution will fail to keep their resolution by March. At the same time, the NHS is under strain to provide many residents with the care they need at one of their busiest periods in the year.
Staff at Kirklees Council considered these facts while planning an email campaign that proactively promoted health and well-being. “The emails we normally send in January tend to be preachy. We wanted to tweak the messaging to something more positive. So we set out to see whether or not our campaign could help people keep their health-based resolutions,” said Niel Stewart, Deputy Head of Strategic Communications.
Kirklees staff defined parameters to evaluate the success of their campaign. Using research, staff determined that behavior interventions typically have improvements between 4% to 7%. The campaign would follow a 66-day timeline, which is the average time it takes to form a new habit. “We just needed to design and build the campaign,” said Niel.
SOLUTION
The team hadn’t used email for previous behavioral campaigns, but felt that it would be the perfect medium for this effort. They recognized, however, that emails typically act as stand-alone pieces of communication, and the subscriber list builds gradually over time, which wouldn’t help Kirklees build the relationships and engagement that were important to the campaign’s success. So they took advantage of the automated drip campaign feature in the govDelivery Advanced package.
To make sure the campaign would stay relevant to subscribers no matter when they opted-in to the campaign, the Kirklees Council communications team created four different email campaign journeys that changed depending on when people signed up. For example, those who signed up early received one cadence of emails while those who signed up later received a different cadence that caught them up quickly with the rest of the participants.
They planned emails for days when they thought their audience would need extra support (Mondays, for example) and kept things fresh and unexpected by varying the days and times when emails were sent. They also avoided the preachy, authoritative tone that many adopt in similar campaigns. Instead, the emails adopted a friendly, relaxed tone.
RESULTS
Did the campaign have an impact? After 66 days and 32 emails, the Resolution: Revolution campaign came to an end. Kirklees staff sent an engagement survey to see if they had really helped residents with their resolutions. Kirklees had expected to see somewhere between 14% to 19% of the campaign recipients to keep their resolutions. They discovered, however, that the campaign helped 71% of participants keep their resolutions.
Importantly, 89% of the survey respondents said that the emails helped them keep their resolutions and that the frequency of emails felt right. Survey responses also brought to light the real impact and true possibilities of effective public sector communications.
According to one respondent, the emails “…have inspired me to try harder, and with renewed confidence to obtain a better, healthier lifestyle. Sometimes a lapse or two has disappointed, however, along came more emails to help me get back on track, and renew my own personal aims and ambitions. The whole experience was really well worthwhile.”
With a smart strategy and an innovative campaign, the communications team at Kirklees Council has illustrated that local authorities can play an active role in resident health and well-being, especially at a time when resources are limited at the NHS.
