PR & Communications

The Local Government Association

Founded in 1997, the Local Government Association is the national membership body for local authorities. The LGA is a politically-led, cross-party organisation that works on behalf of councils to ensure the local government has a strong and credible voice with the national government. Its core membership is made up of 339 English Councils and 22 Welsh Councils.  The LGA aims to influence and set the political agenda on the issues that matter to councils so they are able to deliver local solutions to national problems. They also provide a range of free and subsidised practical improvement support. This includes corporate support, such as leadership programmes, peer challenges and LG Inform (a bench-marking service). Furthermore, they also provide programmes tailored to specific service areas such as children, adults, health, care, financial, culture, tourism, sport and planning services.

Challenge

Timely & Reliable Industry Updates

As the voice of local government on a national scale, LGA's regional teams need insight into their member's circumstances, context, challenges, and successes. In having this insight, they can best respond to, represent and promote their members. To gather this information, the LGA uses its extensive contacts with its members and other networks, including government departments, as well as its parliamentary and press work. When optimising efforts, the organisation recognised that its work would further benefit from daily intelligence from a range of available written sources. Without a consolidated and real-time analytics tool, the regional teams had to take an individual approach which would often be time-consuming and would put extra pressure on the LGA's members if, for example, LGA staff needed to contact them for such intelligence already available.

“We do this [research] in various ways, for example, through our extensive contacts within each of our member organisations, local, regional and national networks, our parliamentary and press work, and work with government departments. But we also need reliable, daily, local political and organisational intelligence. Each regional team has their individual approach, but it was originally very time consuming searching the latest reliable online news on each authority so that we didn’t have to ask our members for it, which would put extra pressure on them. This is when Meltwater came in.”  

Vicki Goddard - Adviser, Local Government Association.

Solution

Regional Intelligence and Reliable Updates

With Meltwater, LGA now receives a daily comprehensive overview of the latest local news updates from reliable sources, enabling them to further understand their members and inform their work and general decision-making process. For the LGA, this consistent form of updates meets their needs as an organisation, providing them with a simple headline, summary and hyperlinks to sources that they can quickly digest and explore further where necessary. They can also access a wide range of resources to help them in their daily tasks, including national, regional and local newspapers, as well as various trade press. This means they can further keep their finger on the pulse and best support their members.

“Meltwater provides the LGA’s regional teams with a daily, reliable, up to date digest of local news that complements and furthers our existing knowledge and understanding of our members’ circumstances, experiences and needs. This enables us to spend more time using the intelligence to inform our work and best support our members.”

Vicki Goddard - Adviser, Local Government Association.

Summary

Using Meltwater The LGA Can Now:

Keep Their Finger on the Pulse

 For LGA, Meltwater insights assist them with identity and following the latest significant challenges that authorities are facing and solving. As a result, the Local Government Association can stay up to date with their member organisations’ recent developments - leading to even more informed decisions on how to best support their members.

Save Time & Work Efficiently

In receiving this information in digestible daily updates, the LGA no longer has the pain point of manually searching for the latest news articles in each region, and makes their process fast and efficient.  

Share Knowledge & Insight

As well as now having a fast and efficient process, the team at LGA can also follow up and share these key insights with their members. Having surfaced insights using Meltwater data, LGA can now actively put members in contact to learn from each other’s experiences and how they have handled certain situations.

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