Founding Year: 2020
Group Size: 37,000 members (private group); 48,000 followers (public page)
Location: Essex, United Kingdom
When Olivia (a pseudonym) was discharged from the hospital in early 2020, the 92-year old woman was worried about how she would cope with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Through Facebook, Olivia connected with Essex County Council (ECC), the local government authority that oversees a county of 1.5 million people in southeastern England. ECC connected Olivia with United in Kind, a volunteer network that ECC, along with hundreds of community groups, charities, volunteer organizations, and leaders of Facebook groups across the county, coordinates via a Facebook page. United in Kind volunteers delivered food to Olivia’s home, drove her to medical appointments, and provided any other essential services that she required during the pandemic.
United in Kind is one of several resources that ECC has developed over the past two years as part of its new model of outreach to vulnerable populations. In addition to pushing out information about public services through traditional media channels, ECC decided to partner with local area Facebook groups and community organizations to reach a broader and more diverse audience. While this approach has led ECC and partners to develop a number of interesting projects, from anti-bullying campaigns to community fridges to recycling initiatives, the focus of this case study is on how ECC leveraged this unique partnership to respond to the pandemic through the Essex Coronavirus Action initiative.
When Kirsty O’Callaghan joined ECC as its Head of Strengthening Communities in 2017, she was tasked with making public services more accessible to the county’s most vulnerable populations, including the elderly, socially isolated people, and those living in economically deprived areas. As the inspiration for turning to Facebook, O’Callaghan recalls an incident when her dog, Martha, escaped while she was away from home. She posted a plea for help to her local area Facebook group. “When I got home an hour later, there were 500 people out looking for Martha,” O’Callaghan remembers.
O’Callaghan realized that the leaders of these placed-based Facebook groups had both a deep knowledge of the problems facing their communities and the ability to reach people who may feel disconnected from local government. In 2018, she began asking local area groups in Essex whether they would be willing to collaborate with ECC on initiatives to address mental health problems that affected many parts of the county. Group leaders were quick to sign up, and the collaboration eventually spawned two mutual aid communities: United in Kind, for people suffering from social isolation and loneliness, and Never Too Late, Mate, a male suicide prevention support group. In the two years since, the collaboration has grown into a network of 600 admins with a combined reach of more than 250,000 people.
When coronavirus began to spread across the United Kingdom in March of 2020, ECC mobilized this network to create a more organized and inclusive response. It created the public-facing Essex Coronavirus Action page to disseminate Essex-specific information about public health guidance, pandemic-related public services, and volunteer opportunities. The Council also created a closed Facebook group, Essex Coronavirus Action Support, for citizens who wanted to privately ask questions and ask for help.
The Essex Coronavirus Action initiative is led by Essex County Council, The Essex Public Health Team, and the leaders of local area Facebook groups.
The private group is governed by a team of 18 admins. Three of these admins carry most of the workload and ECC pays them for their work. O’Callaghan said that the cost to the Council of paying these three admins had been about £70,000 over the first six months of the pandemic.
The admin team is led by community leadership consultant, Emmy Coffey McCarthy. McCarthy says that they have not set written rules for the group because they had to rapidly set it up and onboard members when the pandemic began. “We did not have time to do the usual niceties of declining with feedback and letting people know why their post wasn't acceptable,” McCarthy explains. Rather, the group deals with issues like misinformation on a case by case basis. The admins engage with people who share false information, correct them in a non-judgemental way and point them towards factual information that the group has posted. If necessary, members who continue to escalate arguments are banned or muted (meaning that they are unable to post or comment).
McCarthy says that interactions in the group tend to be civil and the admins rarely have to take punitive actions against members. “My admin team are very experienced and excellent communicators,” McCarthy says, “In 10 years of building digital communities, I have never run a group that relies so little on the tools available and so much on the personalities and skills of the active admins.”
The Essex Coronavirus Action initiative targets county residents who use Facebook as a means of making connections and obtaining information. The private group has nearly 37,000 members, of which 20,000 joined within 72 hours of its creation. The admins ask people to provide their postal code when they request membership to verify that they live in Essex. The group is about 80 percent female and 20 percent male, although McCarthy says that men tend to be overrepresented in discussions. The group is not actively recruiting members, as they rely on the public page, which more than 48,000 users follow, to distribute information to the community.
O’Callaghan thinks that participation in the initiative has been higher than in a typical government program because the Council has reached far more people through Facebook than they could through traditional means. People are drawn to Essex Coronavirus Action’s identity as a collaborative effort rather than a top-down imposition from the government. “We brand very little as the Essex County Council, since people don’t like that brand,” O’Callaghan explains. “But they’ll trust this United In Kind thing because it looks accessible and like it’s not a local authority at all.”
The coronavirus response work in Essex is carried out through a combination of actions on the Page and private group, as well as volunteer-led actions in the real world.
The Essex Coronavirus Action Facebook Page distributes up-to-date information about the pandemic, including public health guidance and information for businesses who are reopening. For instance, in October 2020 the page posted a recording of a coronavirus press conference that was live streamed by the Prime Minister’s office. Such posts reached an estimated 2.1 million News Feeds during the first six weeks of the page’s existence. ECC continues to use the page to push out important information, which O'Callaghan says reaches up to 5 million people every month. ECC also posts information about resources for issues ranging from substance abuse to domestic violence to food insecurity.
The Essex Coronavirus Action Support group has a similar focus to the page, but creates more of a two-way conversation between members and admins. Members ask questions about testing, contact tracing, social distancing, travel restrictions and other pandemic-related topics, which admins or other members answer. Common topics of discussion are what behavior is allowed or advisable under current restrictions (e.g. “Is it safe to meet a family member at their home if we are outside?”, or “Do I have to wear a mask when I’m at the pub, even while seated at a table?”). Emmy McCarthy, or another admin, usually answers these questions and directs the member to relevant public health information.
ECC also uses its online presence to recruit volunteers to support the coronavirus response effort. Individuals and businesses can sign up via a form, which ECC promotes on the Facebook page as well as the Essex.gov.uk website. The form asks about the skills, qualifications, and type of support that volunteers are able to provide. Those who complete the form are entered into a database that ECC can draw on when someone requests assistance.
Between March 14 and March 21, more than 7,000 volunteers signed up to support the coronavirus response effort. Almost 2,000 individuals and more than 70 businesses registered within the first 24 hours. Every day this volunteer force completed more than 1,000 tasks, such as delivering essential supplies to people who were self-isolating and transporting vulnerable people to medical appointments. In one case one young woman returned home after giving birth to a new baby. However, she was not allowed to visit the hospital to breastfeed her baby (who had not yet been discharged) due to the pandemic. She reached out to ECC for help, and was connected with a volunteer who delivered breastmilk to the hospital everyday for months. O’Callaghan says using Facebook as a vehicle to advertise these volunteer opportunities has helped to engage people who want to help, but otherwise wouldn’t know how to get involved. Two-thirds of the volunteers ECC has engaged had no volunteering experience prior to the coronavirus relief effort.
ECC’s online presence has also helped to connect those in need with existing public services. In one case, a woman who lived in another county and was worried about how her elderly parents living Essex would cope during lockdown contacted ECC on Facebook. ECC was able to connect the woman’s parents with the county welfare service to make sure they were taken care of. O’Callaghan sees the Facebook-based outreach model as key to making these success stories a reality. “If we didn’t have this model, it wouldn’t have happened,” O’Callaghan explains. “Other counties have welfare services, and have it advertised in the local press, but they didn’t have the Facebook outreach model that went with it.”
While ECC does not have hard data about the impact of Essex Coronavirus Action on coronavirus spread or mortality rates, O’Callaghan says that the initiative has been a valuable tool to spread public health information, coordinate volunteer work, and identify the areas of the county that are most in need of government support.
In addition to continuing their COVID-19 response work, ECC intends to turn their collaboration with Facebook into a model for public service delivery that other jurisdictions can replicate. The interest that other local government authorities in the UK have shown in Essex’s work inspired O’Callaghan to create a “community campaign model,” which explains how to build a group, map resources and partnerships, and recruit and train volunteers. ECC is working with Facebook and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the government agency that oversees clinical research in the UK, to evaluate the model. The NIHR will evaluate the group’s work according to its impact, the connectivity of the team, and its use of Facebook tools among many other criteria.
O’Callaghan acknowledges the risk that Essex County Council’s work with Facebook may not continue in its current form if someday she is no longer there to support it. “I’ve had other team members say to me, ‘If you left the Essex County Council, this kind of work would die,’” O’Callaghan says. ECC's collaboration with Facebook groups depends on the political will of the Council’s leadership to continue to support the initiative. Local government authorities that want to replicate Essex’s success would need to find organizational leaders who are willing to take a chance on a partnership between the public and private sector as well as skilled and passionate public servants. As such, the transferability of ECC’s model to other jurisdictions remains to be seen.
