What could the national SPF do to better communicate with the regional SPFs?
What could the regional forums do to better communicate with the national forum, local forums and each other?
What should we do?
- Share good practice, from other sectors, local partnerships, regional SPFs and national SPF.
- Empowerment from national level to regional SPFs.
- Improve speed and detail of key communication points from national SPF including highlighting any specific issues for regional SPFs.
- Share more briefings, strategy documents, map of meetings, annual reports, key dates etc. from national SPF.
- Ask for feedback from regional SPFs on key issues which have clear implications for regions.
- Raise the profile of SPF.
How should we do it?
- Quickly!
- Problem re amount/volume of communications (on top of day job). Avoid large volumes of information.
- Make better use of the SPF website:
- share annual reports
- feedback from regional to national and vice versa
- publish key dates
- be less passive
- establish a page for each regional SPF on the national website.
- Produce a regular e-bulletin with:
- alerts to what's on the website
- prompts for regional SPFs to share information via the national SPF website
- latest developments at the national SPF
- Establish networks for sharing information, guidance and messages promoting partnership working in a timely fashion with all organisations.
- Address weaknesses of communications with local partners.
- Establish a vehicle to communicate without going through the SHAs.
- Establish contact lists for regional SPF members. Look at leading edge communications, eg Twitter.
National SPF response
National SPF agrees that improving communications between national and regional SPF, and between the regional SPFs is key to making improvements. As a result the national SPF communications group has agreed to:
- continue to improve the SPF website to address the needs highlighted by regional SPFs
- produce this report in web format to ensure links to regional good practice
- produce a regular e-bulletin which includes:
- key communication points from national SPF meetings
- specific actions or issues for regional SPFs
- updates on SPF work programmes and projects
- links to latest news and new content on the SPF website and key questions for feedback from SPF
- the bulletin will be based on the website and be as concise as possible without losing the required content
- we have asked all regional SPFs for contact lists of members in order to circulate the e-bulletin direct. Members will be able to subscribe or unsubscribe to the update.