Improving your public sector digital engagement strategy starts with making friends

The importance of ‘making friends’ with whoever owns your digital channels

Are your digital channels working for engagement or just working?

There's a pattern we see regularly when reviewing digital engagement strategy for public sector organisations. Digital channels exist, usually managed by someone in the communications team, and they share numbers as a measure of success.

Yet the engagement professionals – the people whose job it is to understand communities, gather insights and build trust – are a step removed from the whole thing.

Yes, we appreciate a sweeping generalisation has been made here, and all organisations work differently, but bear with us, we are making a point.

The evaluation and audit reports you see from digital channels often reflect the priorities of communications, digital, or marketing teams, who have different priorities to engagement: reach, impressions, follower growth and content output.

We propose that your digital channels should be used to tell a much richer story - one that helps your organisation meet, and demonstrate, its responsibilities to engage with the public and its customers.

The case for getting closer

If you're an engagement or experience professional, now is the time to make friends with whoever owns your digital channels.

Not to take over or cause friction, but to have a seat at the table when decisions are made about the direction of channels, what gets posted, how conversations are managed, and what gets measured.

Right now, there’s a good chance digital channels are being evaluated on metrics that have little to do with engagement.

Reach tells you how many people your content was shown to. Shares tell you someone thought it was worth passing on. Likes tell you someone had a momentary positive reaction. These are useful things to know, but they don't tell you whether anyone feels heard, whether a question got answered, whether trust was built, or whether a useful story was gathered.

For engagement work, that's the stuff that matters.

Is the engagement metric actually measuring engagement?

The irony is that "engagement rate", the headline metric on most digital channel dashboards, doesn't really measure engagement in the way that word means to engagement professionals.

A reaction takes less than a second. It doesn't mean someone is ready to participate, share their experience, or trust your organisation with their feedback. It means they scrolled past and tapped something.

At Open Voice Lab, we can help you build a richer scorecard - one that most teams don’t realise is possible with the data they already have.

Channels you should be listening on

Your digital footprint doesn't start and end with the accounts you manage. Communities are already talking about you and your service in spaces you may not be monitoring at all.

Forums. Facebook groups. Reddit threads. Local community pages. Review sites. More niche social platforms.

Social listening - the practice of tracking conversations on channels you don't control - is an increasingly important part of digital engagement work. It means you can start to understand what people are saying about you when they're not talking to you directly.

You need to think about this work as the digital equivalent of being present in the community. It gives you intelligence that no survey or event would ever fully capture - but only if it’s approached in a structured way.

When a channel stops earning its place

It’s also important to remember that not every digital channel deserves your continued investment.

Some channels simply don't generate the kind of exchange that engagement work needs. There's no dialogue, no feedback that can be acted on, no community building. The organisation posts but doesn’t get anything useful out of it.

Other digital channels are more actively problematic. Environments that cause harm to the staff who have to monitor them. Spaces where your presence signals endorsement of a culture that doesn't reflect your values. This is something to think about.

Not every platform is worth being on. Leaving a channel or scaling back your presence can itself be a principled decision that allows you to direct your energy elsewhere.

A better digital engagement strategy for public sector teams - the Open Voice Lab view

We believe that digital channels are one of the most underused assets in public sector engagement - not because organisations aren't active on them, but because they're rarely designed or evaluated with engagement as the primary purpose.

At Open Voice Lab, we work with engagement and experience professionals who want to change that. We help teams audit what their channels are actually delivering, build a richer picture of value that goes beyond reach and likes, and develop their confidence to influence how those channels are run - even when they don't own them directly.

When digital channels are used to genuinely listen, gather insight and build relationships over time, they become something much more powerful than merely promoting a survey or event. They become part of your engagement infrastructure.

If you'd like to think this through…

If you'd like to take a fresh look at what your digital channels are really delivering, and what they could be with a new strategy, we’d love to talk.