Public Health Campaign for COVID-19

  • Digital

  • Campaigns

  • Crisis and issues

  • Media

Crisis communications response to the Covid-19 pandemic for a South London local authority.

Throughout the pandemic, we worked with South London Clinical Commissioning Group and the local authority’s Public Health providing crisis communications support and ongoing assistance with community outreach and the public health campaign. 

For the first few months, the Filigree team was embedded within the in-house Corporate Communications team working alongside the Director of Public Health and NHS colleagues. Our initial role was to establish a crisis communications rhythm for disseminating critical public health messages across the borough to the 330,000 residents. We established daily intelligence and monitoring reports to identify issues and enable the team to respond. We also developed a messaging approach to ensure consistency across all channels including social media, website and increasingly print materials as we roll out a hyper local campaign as part of Keep London Safe. 

Like local authorities across the country, we led the Council’s communication preparation for local outbreaks and proactive measures to ensure public health messages are clearly understood. This involved tapping into the established community, faith and voluntary networks across the borough to share insights and to help amplify our messages. 

Direct experience in local government throughout the pandemic gives us insight into the challenges in conveying public health and safety measures as we worked closely within the local government network, London Councils, GLA and the Cabinet Office.

During this time, we helped deliver a people-led campaign to highlight the individual stories of living through the COVID-19 pandemic. We curated a programme of written interviews and video stories with high quality photography that was cascaded through the Council’s corporate communications channels within a programme of Instagram posts as well as a round up in the borough-wide newsletter. It required a thoughtful approach to respect the challenging circumstances and experiences many individuals were facing but the result was a powerful collection of stories of genuine lived experience.