Connecting Communications: Building Trust with Your Sw Operations

Last year, the City of Saint Paul experienced its third swiest season on record, with over 90.3″ of sw—almost double the yearly swfall average. Saint Paul Public Works, which is responsible for winter maintenance of more than 1,800 lane miles, had 44 winter events, declared seven sw emergencies, and instituted a one-sided parking ban. Discover how you can better connect your winter sw operations with your communications and engagement strategies to build transparency and trust with staff and residents. Learn how to start to internally align agency operations and communications objectives. Create a comprehensive team and process that allows your agency’s communications and operations to be more flexible and responsive to the changing needs of each weather event and residents’ service expectations. Learn how you can do a simple communications “audit” of both your internal and external target audiences. Who are you reaching? Who are you missing? What are your goals? Discover how leveraging media relationships during your most challenging times can build credibility and authenticity with the public. Review various communications and engagement channels, including social, web, and digital advertising to reach your target audience. Identify ways you might get creative with your engagement opportunities with limited budget and staff.

At the conclusion of this session, participants will be better able to:

• Advocate for a stronger working partnership between communications and operations to develop a comprehensive public information and media strategy that is integrated with operations efforts.
• Review what a communications audit is and why it’s important. Discover which communications channels, tools, and messages might work best to reach internal and external target audiences. Discover how to be more inclusive of your communications efforts to reach a broader public audience.
• Communicate how working with the media can help build public trust and credibility during challenging winter weather events. They are a key partner, t an enemy.