The following content was written by tCI Fellow Jonathan Bradley, who specialises in Social Media. He runs our courses: Using Social Media in Public Engagement & Consultation & Social Media for Consultation 

Problem

One of the difficulties faced by public consultation is reaching target audiences and getting them to take part. Well, Facebook advertising is a great way to get your consultation content in front of people and get them involved.

Imagine you are running a consultation about changes to local hospital services.  What kinds of things might you want people to do? Who do you want to encourage to take part? Maybe you want people to download a document, watch a video, sign-up for a focus group, attend an event or complete a consultation survey.  And maybe you want more young people, or working people, or people with an interest in healthcare, or new mums or people from a particular town. Facebook advertising can help you reach these people and ask them to take part in different aspects of your consultation.

Locations

Targeting people within certain locations enables us to include people from across your area, rather than relying on the most well-informed people to come forward. Not only can we target people by any general area, we can also target by postcode to ensure you’re only reaching people who are exactly where you want to reach. This can also be defined by whether people are actually living in the area, or just visiting.

Please click here for the rest of the content.