Who’s afraid of social media? Taking a targeted approach to reaching the support workforce via Facebook
It can be easy to assume that our resources reach our target audiences. However, our data and networks reveal that the support workforce in NHSScotland knows very little about us, our resources and how they can use them to support their own development.
The support workforce is a large and diverse group of support staff, drawn from three main job families:
- Estates and facilities
- Business and admin
- Nursing, midwifery and allied health professions
In March 2020 we launched a new version of TURAS Learn professional portfolio. This would be available to any staff across the health and social care workforce who were not using one of the existing portfolios. Whilst Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) was one of the key drivers behind the resource, we wanted to promote existing websites and the importance of recording work-based learning.
What did we set out to achieve?
The NES team in collaboration with our digital partners set out to:
- Re-start promoting the portfolio which had been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic response
- Test the impact of a social media campaign via Facebook for this diverse and at times, hard to reach workforce
- Increase TURAS Learn Professional Portfolio awareness and new registrations
- Increase awareness of NES resources on Support Workforce Hub and Support Worker Central websites.
How did we do this?
We commissioned a Facebook campaign to promote the benefits of signing up to and using TURAS Learn Professional Portfolio. This built on previous experience in 2020 to promote COVID-19 learning resources for HCSWs. In this second campaign our audience was the wider support workforce, including staff in business and admin, estates and facilities and nursing, midwifery and allied health profession roles.
Digital agency expertise was essential in creating the potential target audience using NES lists of job families, job titles and established contact lists. The project team met weekly to test, refine and agree the audience lists. This preparation work was an essential step towards the campaign goals.
This was our second experience of a targeted Facebook campaign, our first during COVID-19 response phase had been highly successful. This was a different time and a different message. We knew staff were tired and might not be so willing to engage with learning.
The campaign had three phases: reach, inform and re-target. The timing of each phase was informed by reviewing the data from the previous week and active monitoring of campaign performance.
Results
The Facebook campaign ran for 5 weeks in March-April 2021, pausing over the Easter holiday weekend.
As a test of using Facebook to promote a learning resource, the campaign achieved:
- Over 1 million impressions
- An estimated reach of 50,000
- Almost 24,000 thruplays of the video content
- A potential re-targeting audience of 9,500 – 10,000 people
- Evidence that over 90% of people viewed the content on a mobile device
- Increased registrations during March 2021 of 750 new Turas accounts
We also achieved the goal of increased awareness of and access to the websites:
- Support Workforce Hub - a huge 1376% traffic increase (179 hits in Jan-Feb 2021 to 2643 for Mar-Apr 2021)
- Support Worker Central – the new landing page created for the campaign attracted 1,741 page views
Our Learning and next steps
This method of social media engagement can be re-used for these same staff or similar staff groups to collect feedback and drive engagement, particularly around developed resources, support and opportunities for involvement.
The success identifies an avenue and opportunity to foster a sense of shared community for these groups and to promote networking and collaboration where this may commonly be a challenge.
The large increases in access to resource sites (Support Workforce Hub and Support Worker Central) shows an interest in accessing the ‘right’ (valuable) material. The next stage will be continuing this drive and taking it to another level – to ask direct questions, to allow people to collaborate and engage with each other directly and tell us what they are looking for next.
May, 26 2021