Al Smith Social media in local government

Advertisement on newcastle.gov.uk

Below is a draft proposal for advertisement on Newcastle City Council's website. There's also a very useful policy here

Introduction

The council homepage typically attracts around 300,000 unique visitors each month. These visitors use the council website to search for information relevant to their experience of the city. In order to offset the cost of providing these facilities and of maintaining the quality and relevance of content it may be desirable to use the website to generate revenue.

Based on figures provided by other councils we could perhaps generate £15,000-£20,000 p.a. by hosting advertisements on the site.

Options

1. Carry on with the current model without advertisement
+ No additional associated costs
+ Avoid controversy
+ Does not change aesthetic values of site
- Does not generate revenue
- Misses out on added value of adverts

2. Manage advertisement in-house. Expand the current advertisement sales capacity in the communication and marketing team to cover selling space on the website and provide design services
+ Full control over placement and content of advertisers
+ Revenue generation
+ Added value for visitors
- Costs of management may outweigh income
- Extra demands at a time when capacity is threatened

3. Seek outside agency to manage advertisement for us
+ Revenue generation
+ No additional costs
+ Added value for visitors
- Commission taken by supplier
- Need to work closely with supplier to define appropriate advertisers

Recommendations

To maximise the value of the website, to cover the staff costs of moderation, and to fund innovation and research it is my recommendation that the council pursue the third option. Further to this I would recommend that we select a supplier with other public sector clients so that our specific requirements are understood.

Option one does not provide revenue generation and option two would require too much officer time to manage.

Concerns over monetisation of this resource raised by the public can be offset by explaining that these actions help to keep costs down. In addition advertisements may point the customer to relevant content on other sites which we do not hold ourselves. As such if a customer is seeking information on a health issue we would be able to direct them to retailers of relevant products through advertisements, without specific endorsement of the retailer.

Adverts should be held off site and content pulled through online; this would mean we would not have to host third party content on our servers beyond the source code required for this. This would pose no risk to our servers and little demand on capacity.

The code itself should be capable of being cut and pasted into webpage templates, this is a job which should take less than one hour and should not require ongoing commitment.

It is my understanding that the communication and marketing team would have the skills and expertise to liaise with the chosen supplier. All ongoing moderation of advert content would therefore be carried out by the communication and marketing team.

The next step would be to seek a suitable supplier, pending acceptance of these recommendations.

Examples of other local authorities using ads

http://www.fylde.gov.uk
http://www.nottingham.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=171
http://www.merton.gov.uk/learning.htm
http://www.huntsdc.gov.uk/
http://www.westoxon.gov.uk/living/Housing.cfm
http://www.weymouth.gov.uk