Do what it says on the can

Pardon me while I take the opportunity to blow my own trumpet. I used to work for North Shropshire District Council. When I joined it was considered by the government's inspectorate to be one of the worst performing councils in the country. When I left it was considered to be one of the best. That was good news but not quite excellent news.

You see, though satisfying the Audit Commission is important, the real measure of success is satisfying the people the Council serves. The measure used across local councils in England is the question "How satisfied are you with the way the local authority runs things". You can, and I have, criticise this as a measure of customer satisfaction but it has the advantage of being standardised and widely understood.

In 2005 only 46% of the people we served were satisfied with the way we ran things. By 2007 we had moved that to 54%: an eight point increase at a time when satisfaction was tending to decline. We were pleased with the progress but it still compared badly with other district councils (half of the district councils in the country have satisfaction ratings of 55% or above). 

I've just been sent the satisfaction data for 2008 and now 61% of local residents are satisfied with the way the council runs things. That puts the council into the top band for district councils and means that satisfaction jumped a further 7 points in just one year.

So how did we do this? Well clearly we started providing better services, really good services actually. Councillors became much more confident in making and sticking to decisions. We set up a range of mechanisms to listen to the concerns of local people and businesses and we changed and adapted what we did in response to what they said. We were clear about how we were going to improve people's lives (and how we weren't) and we told people what we were up to. 

In short we used communications as a tool to improve the business. This is strategic communications. It isn't rocket science, you should be doing it, it does work and I can prove it.

Image is Trumpet by MauritsV and used under CC-SA-2.0