Wow, what a week it has been - flooding, snow, falling trees, roofs blowing off, missing animals and road closures! I am not going to lie, it has been stressful, but it is at times like this that I am proud to be working in local government with such driven, motivated and kind people who, when it matters, want to step up and support those around them.
I wanted to write this down mainly to get everything out of my head and refocus on getting through the next few days, and, as I started writing I thought, maybe this should be a blog post, so here we go!
So, what happened?
Friday 7 February
It all started when a message came in from Zoe, who is responsible for parking in Shropshire. Zoe had two issues: the first was around how we communicate with our staff in relation to car park closures and the weather situation as it evolved, and the second was raising a concern about how we were communicating these messages to the public.
We immediately put an arrangement in place with Zoe whereby she would start to split her reports down into two audiences, staff and the public, so that it was easier for us to digest and communicate the message. This was then followed up by emails from our Emergency Planning Team on the current state of affairs in relation to flooding and river levels.
One issue that cropped up at an early stage was the way we received updates from our Highways teams. They were quite rightly out doing their jobs and making the highways safe, but were not getting the opportunity to update us regularly. Instead, they were completing proformas and returning them in bulk at various times during the day. This was frustrating for them as well as for us, and I did think that there were opportunities here to improve the flow of information between us, them, Customer Services and Emergency Planning.
The next dilemma, what do we do over the weekend? It was late in the day and I had to think on my feet so we used the existing newsflash on our website to add information about flooding, and decided that I would be on call and update the website and our corporate Twitter account.
I must admit, up until this point I wasn’t really aware of the situation or how bad it was going to get. What happened next was fantastic and has changed our approach and commitment to social media in the future.
Saturday 8 February
I was woken in the early hours to find that our main website had crashed (if you work in this area you know how I was feeling hearing that news at this time!), which was doubly troublesome as we had a budget consultation due to end the next day. The issue came down to a power outage in one of our council buildings where this server was based, which ended up as a pretty good test of the council's DR (Disaster Recovery) plan! We used Twitter as a way of communicating with the public and taking any urgent enquiries that they had while the website was down, which wasn't ideal but certainly did the trick until the website was back up and running again in the afternoon.
Sunday 9 - Monday 10 February
As the water rose, we expanded our coverage of the floods to cover our neighbouring counties and the impact on public transport and services in the region.
Tuesday 11 February
Following the troubles that arose from the website outage and the lack of updates from other services to us, we called an urgent meeting with representatives from Customer Services, Parking, Emergency Planning and Communications to look at issues with a view to resolving them and ultimately giving a better service to the public.
One thing we agreed was that we would redesign the proforma that highways teams were using to make it clearer as to what closures had been lifted, which were new and which were still outstanding. This was received well by the Highways manager and has since been put into action.
That evening, my team took over from me to cover Twitter and update the website as the heavy wind and rain started ramping up again.
Wednesday 12 February
This was the most challenging afternoon and evening to date by far, with winds battering the county and trees falling everywhere!
It got to the point in Customer Services where there were so many fallen trees being reported that staff were having to write them up on flip chart paper and stick it to the walls in the contact centre to enable their colleagues to check if a tree had already been reported, and prevent duplicate reports being forwarded on to the Highways team.
Debbie, who works in our Customer Services team, was sending me photos of each flip chart via WhatsApp in order for me to get the website up to date – it was a slightly chaotic solution to a rapidly evolving problem, but actually it worked.
We then spent a bit of time building a dedicated section of the website for flooding and emergency advice, which made it easier for the public to find the information they want, and also made it much easier for the team to keep it updated.
As the day wore on, once again my team rallied round and quickly pulled together an out-of-hours rota which enabled us to work through the night.
It was interesting to note that between 3:15pm and midnight we had an increase in contact of 78% compared to the same day the week before!
Thursday 13 February
Owing to the sheer amount of information we had to display, we spent a bit more time further refining the layout of the road closures and fallen trees pages. Breaking the information down into tables gave us the best results, and it highlighted where there were duplicates (owing to the differing ways and times the details were reported to us, and who had added the information to the page).
Friday 14 February
The weather finally seemed to relent and we were left thinking about how we would use Twitter during the lull between storms. After being so active the last thing we wanted to do was then go quiet so I decided to do a #meetthemanagers activity where we asked three senior managers to take over twitter for 30 minutes each and take questions from the public. This was really well received and something we are looking to implement on a more regular basis. Another thing that came from the #meetthemanagers session was an idea from our area commissioner Chris Edwards, who suggested that I go out on a gritter this week and tweet about the experience. Keep your eyes peeled guys as this will be happening :-)
So, what have we learnt from this?
We should actively use social media as a communications and customer service channel!
Shropshire Council have had a Twitter account for quite some time now, but, up to this point, we had mainly used it to push out RSS feeds on jobs and news from our Shropshire Newsroom. This has made the account seem rather robotic.
I decided early on during this event that I was going to tell everyone my name and tell them what I would be doing and was surprised at the responses. By being so up front and personable, we really started to involve people, and make them pay attention to the information we were providing. Having the rest of the team identify themselves when they started and ended their shift on the account also reinforced this, as we found people actually wanted to say "hi" or "goodbye" to each person as they came and went.
It was at that point it dawned on me: we desperately needed to consider this a real channel and a channel of choice for many people. I was always aware of this but had never really seen the power of Twitter in full swing at such a challenging time.
I think there is some real work to be done within the organisation to demonstrate what a brilliant tool social media is, and for us culturally to accept social media as a channel rather than something that is there simply to push messages out, but I am up for the challenge and have some real hard evidence now to help me on my mission.
Real-time interaction is beneficial to everyone
One of the most encouraging things to come out of this event was seeing how our partners and other agencies worked together, and the shift in the way we communicate with each other.
For example, we tweeted "#Fallentree: Bishops Close, W. Felton (SY11) - Off the car park at the top. One tree leaning precariously on another, please avoid the area" and Oswestry Police responded saying "@ShropCouncil are police needed or have you staff on scene to deal?". Great to see this team work.
This also applied with colleagues in other counties. A picture of a flooded road and self-built defences protecting a residential property (shown here above) was sent to me on Saturday morning and I tweeted it to Worcester City Council to see if they could help. The police picked up on the tweet and within minutes asked me for a location so that they could go and help.
Some highlights, stats and feedback
As this is a long post already, we've put together a PDF scrapbook of @shropcouncil Twitter feedback and stats from this event for you to read through at your leisure.
We've had some good feedback about our teamwork across the council. Tim Sneddon, Environment Maintenance Service Manager had this to say:
"This has been a testing time for Shropshire Council Highways staff, our partners and contractors. We have had our gritters out 14 times since 9 February, had the River Severn in Shrewsbury up to 4.5m (the normal typical range over a season is 0.4 to 2.3m) leading to a number of road closures, and had hundreds of trees blown down and bits blown from building in the winds of last Wednesday, all adding to further closures.
An example of the work done over this period is that of Shrewsbury Town Council’s parks staff who had removed 78 fallen trees from the highway by the end of Thursday. Another is that Ringway, our highway maintenance contractor, attended to 65 out of hours emergency calls and had teams all over the place closing roads, dealing with floods clearing drains and clearing away trees.
All involved pulled together brilliantly and by Thursday morning there was very little disruption to the travelling public. It looks as though we are in for a few days of more settled weather so hopefully there will be some respite for the time being."
Our Emergency Planning team were also impressed by the way everyone has pulled together:
"The past week of severe flooding has tested Shropshire Council, the emergency services and other partner agencies in protecting local communities. The multi-agency approach to responding, warning and informing our communities has worked extremely well and has been well co-ordinated.
Lorna and her team even got a specific mention during a West Mercia Strategic Coordinating Group (SCG) teleconference, as she (Lorna) and her team had tweeted throughout the night and into the morning, ensuring key messages around flooding and fallen trees were getting out in a timely manner, something we (Shropshire Council) have never been able to do before. For Emergency Planning we have seen an increase, by in excess of 100, of followers to our @ShropCaution account!"
To sum up
The personal touch is definitely something that we will continue with, and we are looking at using all the feedback from the past week to build a business case for a member of staff who can be committed to the development of our social media presence.
We will be having a debrief with all services shortly to reflect on all the lessons learnt along the way and I'm sure that there will be really great opportunities to improve the way that we communicate, not only with each other, but with you guys, our customers, the public.
Overall, at a time of massive cuts within local government, I have been overwhelmed by people's drive and motivation during the week.