Ask most people what they’d like from their community representatives, and I suspect that many of them would just like to be kept more in the loop about the local decisions and activities that are likely to affect their daily lives. Yet, community council meetings and websites can only go so far to do that, and that takes resource, work and effort.

What if we could very quickly get messages to people’s phones and e-mails, especially where they are time critical (for example, when we have certain weather events and we need to tell people what might be happening in different places or where they can find help and assistance e.g. school closure, health centre drop in locations, grit bin locations etc).

These sorts of events don’t wait for regular communication channels and we’re seeing how social media can often be misused in such circumstances. Well, that’s something that the Improvement Service has built a solution to do – albeit for different initial reasons.

Over the past eight years, as part of our Digital Public Services portfolio, we’ve built a service called tellmescotland. This was initially created to start to digitally share the planning notifications that have traditionally needed to be posted in newspapers. And it’s been very effective at doing that - on a limited budget.

However, this same service can be used for pretty much any information notification a council wishes to get out to the general public. All a person needs to do is sign up to the services they have an interest in and set their notifications to their area of interest (whether that be within a 2-mile radius of where they live, or council-wide). They will then either get a text message or e-mail – depending on their own preference – as soon as the council pushes out such a notice.

tellmescotland is now used to inform people of road closures and traffic works, licencing applications, councillor surgeries and a whole host of other activities. But, many potential use cases haven’t yet been explored.

• Imagine if we wanted to inform the public where they could collect sandbags in times of flooding?
• Or if we wished to make the public more vigilant about potential harms – I’m thinking here about our risk appetite in going to the shops when we all had to live through the pandemic.
• Or, might we want to inform people about advice-sharing sessions run in the community?
• Maybe you just want more people to get enthused and involved in what your community council actually does – and a way to attract under-represented people?
• Other than traditional and social media – might the local authorities and community councils wish to have more control over these messages and their timely dissemination. tellmescotland could be that service.

One thing is for sure, digital communications are becoming the norm and everyone relies on their phone to keep up to date with what is going on in the world. So, we need to do everything we can to embrace these new ways of getting our important messages out to the public.

So, if you’re keen to explore how your community council could start to use this service to better engage with people in your community, get in touch via: tellme@improvementservice.org.uk and feel free to promote the service to people within your area whenever you can.