Creating a Varied and Successful Communications Campaign - Central Coast Council

Central Coast Council gets creative with social media

Location: Regional NSW
​Population: 335,309
Years involved in Garage Sale Trail: 4

Central Coast Council are a long term supporter of Garage Sale Trail and have been involved since 2015. Year on year the level of engagement from the community continues to grow.

Madalaine Waters, Assistant Communication Officer, provided us with some insights into their 2018 success and how they utilised resources to activate a wide variety of communication channels, including internally. Learn more

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This quick video summaries some of her top tips and promotional channels;
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What's one of your top tips?
Assess things as you go along. For example when looking into the Real-Time Impacts feature on the Dashboard I noticed that most of our sales are household sales and we haven’t got too many community groups involved, hence I am going to do some specific promotion highlighting the benefits for community groups and encouraging them to get involved.

What other areas of promotion have you been focusing on?
I have made sure to involve our Internal Communications team. As we are a large council, we have a strong internal focus when it comes to promoting the program.
I have organised two radio campaigns over a two week period with two local radio stations and have been trialling using some of the different engagement tools on Facebook and Instagram, for example, stories, polls, questions, lists and interactive posts to increase community engagement.
I’ve been trying to cover a broad range of channels too including putting information and links in our corporate e-news as well as creating an event for our website and Facebook page.
We also had a great opportunity to utilise some advertising at a recent Football game at Central Coast Stadium. This was the first game that Usain Bolt played at so I thought it would be a great opportunity to reach a large crowd. We had a PA announcement run and a slide on the big screen.

​Have you had an out-of-the ordinary costs?
Our promotional budget has largely been distributed to two radio campaigns over a two week period with two local radio stations, then followed by print advertising in the Central Coast Express Advocate and our local community papers. We haven’t really had any out of the ordinary costs.
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Who at Council is involved?
I am the managing Communication Officer for this campaign and am working closely with our Senior Project Officer in Waste Services who approves all the collateral. I have also brought in our Internal Communication team to focus on the staff angle. We are quite a large Council and employ a number of Coasties so I wanted to try and target them too.

Central Coast Council Media Examples