What to expect from Kirsty O’Callaghan, Head of Strengthening Communities at Essex County Council, at the CIPR East Anglia's Best PRactice Conference: Bitesize on Thursday 6 May.

Kirsty will be sharing how they have been using Facebook Communities to connect with local residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are three things you can expect from the session:

Belonging: community campaigns allow you to address societal issues at scale while fostering a sense of belonging - meeting people where they are. It converts digital information into social action through sustained behavioural change while generating connection and resilience.

Future planning: community campaigns allow us to deeply understand sentiment around our most pressing issues. We use that to map the needs, wants and desires of our communities. This can be used to access and predict for the future in a more multi-dimensional way.

Financial: community campaigns represent a significant saving to the public purse. In comparison to other programmess of work which do not adopt a community approach the campaigns save an average of £600k but the impact they have is much greater.

For full details on both Kirsty's session and the other conference speakers, and to access registration links, please visit https://ciprea.org/homepage/cipr-ea-best-practice-conference/conference-2021/.