Helping the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to support the community via social media in the wake of the Grenfell tower tragedy

Liz Scarff, Fieldcraft Studios’ director, was asked by The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to consult on their social media output in the months following the devastating Grenfell Tower disaster.

Liz has years of experience in using social media during and after humanitarian disasters around the world, such as the devastating hurricane in Haiti.

She is also experienced in working with communities, the rise of user-generated content and has contributed to books and academic papers writing on how the media landscape has been re-written by social media.

Digital review

The council wanted to ensure that their communication with the community was as effective as it could be. And they wanted to ensure that their social media channels were optimised.

The first step was a digital review.

First, we looked at the audience.

Of course, we knew that the council needed to communicate with the community and in particular the Grenfell Tower survivors.

But we dug deeper and asked questions about what technology the Grenfell Tower survivors were using to get online (mobiles or desktops). How did the age demographics break down and how did each age group prefer to receive news and information.

Most importantly what information did they need and want? And how did they want to receive it

Sharing information internally

We also looked at the different departments within the council.

We interrogated what key information individual departments needed to be communicating to the public. We also looked at the flow of that information – how easy was it for the comms team to receive and then in turn share that info with the community.

To do this we conducted council-wide interviews across departments.

Making recommendations

We produced a full report and made recommendations that would improve their social media communications.

The council then asked us to build the website for their public consultation. Read about this piece of work here.