Surrey County Council

As the global coronavirus crisis took hold of the entire nation, Air Social was appointed by Surrey County Council (SCC) to help implement and streamline its Test and Trace strategy.

Surrey CC Case Study
Surrey CC Case Study
Surrey CC Case Study

The Challenge

Central Government’s initial attempts to develop a digital contact-tracing app, following the outbreak of coronavirus in March 2020, had been unsuccessful.

With lockdown measures beginning to ease towards the end of June 2020, finding an alternative way of tracing, tracking and notifying people of any localised outbreak became essential.

In the event of such an outbreak, the council needed to be able to distribute urgent updates, within minutes, to those living or working within a set catchment area and signpost them to the correct sources of relevant information and guidance on what to do next.

Surrey CC Case Study
Surrey CC Case Study

Our Approach

Air Social devised a digital marketing campaign that would help deliver these messages throughout SCC’s administrative area using social media and geo-targeting techniques.

This method of communication is immeasurably faster than more traditional forms of advertising, such as via print media or a leaflet drop that would take weeks to print and deliver.

Surrey’s circa 800,000 Facebook and Instagram users were the primary target audience for the #KeepSurreySafe campaign, which provided real-time updates on Test and Trace across the county.

We delivered daily social media content to remind Surrey residents to adjust their actions to help prevent a local outbreak and selected specific target audiences for certain messages – based on postcodes, age and multiple other criteria – through paid adverts. For example, a post relating to children returning to school targeted at parents.

Additionally, Air Social used advanced methods of geo-targeting to deliver urgent messaging directly to those who needed to hear it. This included self-isolation instructions for those in a localised lockdown area and tailored messages to pin drop locations within a specific radius of an outbreak epicentre. We also used the Google Display network to target internet users not active on social media, essentially making it possible to reach every Surrey resident online.

Surrey CC Case Study
Surrey CC Case Study

What the client says

“The Air Social team have been a fantastic asset that Surrey County Council has been able to call upon”

COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR, SURREY COUNTY COUNCIL

The Results

#KeepSurreySafe has proved so successful that Air Social has adapted and rolled out the campaign to other local authorities in England including Devon County Council and West Sussex County Council.

We have also used the same techniques to help NHS partnerships communicate messaging around the first, second and booster doses of the coronavirus vaccination.

11,180,060

Snapchat impressions since May 2021

2,186,295

reach since July 2020

86,249

link clicks since July 2020

Surrey CC Case Study

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