How do people see their local council? The mayor of one East Anglian borough made no bones about it, according to recent reports. They regard their local authority as Dickensian, bureaucratic, expensive and inefficient, she said.
Margaret Marks, mayor of St Edmundsbury in Suffolk, is clearly not one to mince her words — the product of intensive interaction with locals during doorknocking sessions for a recent by-election.
However, her view is tempered by an important caveat: her council is doing a great job providing the services people need, she says, but the problem is communicating the good news to the community. It's a question of perception.
Once you start talking to people face to face, Mayor Marks explains, their understanding of what their council does for them, within very demanding constraints, quickly changes. This means that what councils must do more of, she says, is spell out what they do more clearly and simply, in language people understand.
Reputation has been a concern in local government for many years and there is now no shortage of help and advice for councils wanting to improve their image.
The Local Government Association (LGA) provides extensive online resources including 'health checks and peer reviews' with advice on how to gather the views of residents, including several different kinds of survey, and the offer of a professional communications review.
A series of real-life case studies shows how some of the PR and marketing theory can be put into practice, ranging from a 'Let's Keep it Clean' project in Nottingham to a sexual exploitation awareness campaign in Dudley to 'Operation Chip Pan Safety' in South Yorkshire.
Nevertheless, local government leaders acknowledge there is some way to go in ensuring that councils maintain effective communications with their local populations.
The biggest priority for local authority heads of communications, the most recent survey carried out by the LGA highlights, is reputation: how satisfied residents are with their local area, how informed they feel and how responsive they find their council.
But these same heads of communications often do not hold very senior roles. Only 35% of the survey's respondents sit on their organisation’s corporate or senior management team, while only a quarter report to their chief executive. 'We still have some way to go before communications occupies a seat at the top table’, the report concludes.
This may in part explain why, in the words of the report, 'many councils are still not asking residents for their views or undertaking regular surveys.'
The advent of social media has made a fundamental change in the way PR and marketing are conducted, and some of the good news in the survey is that almost all the councils were using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to engage their residents, while nearly two thirds said developing digital skills was a priority for the year ahead.
Resources - so often the root cause of difficulties in the age of austerity - appear not to be a particular problem when it comes to local government PR. A survey by the industry magazine Press Gazette three years ago found that councils employed more than twice the number of media and marketing officers than the whole of central government, with several large city authorities boasting 20 or more.
Defenders of those kinds of figures in local government and in the PR industry more broadly would say money spent on effective communications is a worthwhile investment, especially given increasing demands for efficiency and the problems caused by shrinking funds.
Others might ask whether such seemingly big spending on PR represents good value for money. That is a difficult question to answer because of the complexity of measuring the outcomes of PR and marketing activities. As was once famously said about advertising, about half the money spent on PR is effective, but it is impossible to know which half.
There is little doubt that councils have improved their ability to communicate with and engage their local communities in recent years. Most understand the need to promote the work they do in an effective and professional way.
It is for the general public to take a view on just how effective it is. Some may still regard their council as 'Dickensian'. Others will have got the message that the town hall is doing the best it can in difficult times.
