Wiltshire County Council

Robert Key Esq MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA

I am so pleased you found the June edition of Wiltshire Magazine attractive and informative. Producing the magazine is part of our overall communication strategy to keep local people informed about the council and the services we provide, promote local involvement and transparency in decision-making and increase public satisfaction with the authority. We were pleased to see recently that the number of people who felt informed about the council had risen from 54% to 62% and the number who felt satisfied with the council has risen from 53% to 64%, we feel the magazine has contributed significantly to those results.

You had some particular questions about distribution and cost which I'm happy to answer. Distribution of publications is a tricky issue for most councils. We decided to go for a policy of making the magazine available in public places in local communities like libraries, council offices, local shops, post offices, etc. This was for three reasons; value, choice and reliability.

Value

Distributing a magazine to every household is very expensive because you have to pay Royal Mail or others to deliver it and, obviously, you have to print more copies. We therefore print and distribute 43,000 copies. This means the cost is kept to under six pence per household per edition. The cost of production does not include staff time. This is difficult to calculate as the whole team contribute to its production in some way and the work is embedded into their daily operations. For example, a lot of the features start out as press releases and are expanded for the magazine, so most of that work would be done as part of our press office work anyway, similarly with the commissioning of photography. The PR staff seek out sponsorship opportunities to pay, in cash or kind, for events and promotion as part of their work, the magazine is now offered as part of a package we can offer potential sponsors. In the communications unit we employ eight staff, two of whom are part time. We have a head of communications, a media relations team of three, 1.8 FTE staff to cover PR and internal communications, and 1.8 FTE administrative and support staff. We also have a network of contributors in service departments who form the editorial board and devote some of their time.

Choice

We decided to start producing the magazine last year after we surveyed our citizen's panel, People's Voice. More than half said they didn't feel informed about the county council, interestingly the same number that didn't feel satisfied with the council. Residents said they wanted us to communicate with them directly. We did not, however, want to foist the magazine on people; we wanted them to want to read it. The evidence we looked at showed many councils pay a fortune to get the paper delivered door to door, only for it to be seen as 'junk mail1 and put in the bin. Feedback from our readers has been wholly positive and we believe this is because of the 'softly softly1 approach to distribution. Comments include '...puts a more open, friendly face on what you get up to, and where my hard-earned pennies get spent1 and "... a well-presented, interesting magazine, which gave an interesting overall view of what's going on (or not) and enabled me to put my own area in the context of the whole".

Reliability

No distribution company can guarantee household delivery, as your own experience of not getting a copy of your district council newspaper demonstrates. We have therefore spent a lot of energy building up a truly local distribution network based around how people live their lives. The parish councils have been very helpful in this, for example, in your constituency we have copies available in all the local libraries and on board the mobile library, in the district hospital and a number of doctors' surgeries, post offices at Whiteparish, Woodfalls, Shrewton and Figheldean. The Barford Inn and Woodford Mill B & B stock the magazine and in Ebbesbourne Wake the parish council places 50 copies in the bus shelter at The Cross. We offer a subscription service to readers who can ask for a free personal copy and many readers have called to request copies for friends, neighbours and family here and abroad. WeVe also had many wardens from sheltered housing call and ask for copies for their residents who cannot get out and about.

I understand all our MP's are now automatically sent a copy, along with other influential figures in the county, so I hope you will enjoy reading future issues.

Cabinet Office, County Hall, Trowbridge, Wiltshire BA14 8JN