City of Joondalup
City of Joondalup has been selected as an ABA100® Winner for Comms Excellence in The Australian Business Awards 2022. The Australian Business Award for Comms Excellence [COM] recognises organisations that have successfully implemented initiatives that demonstrate excellence in communications.
“The City of Joondalup is proud to win this significant national award for the innovative communications and media campaign that was undertaken on Valentine’s Day 2022. This initiative was a practical and fun way for us to showcase our change in approach to parking offences at the City, with a focus on education rather than enforcement.
“It is testament to the professionalism, expertise, and high standards of our team at the City that they have won against the best marketing and PR agencies and private businesses across Australia who entered these awards.
“I congratulate all involved in this great success story for the City and for local government, particularly our Community Safety and Communications and Stakeholder Relations teams.”
The City of Joondalup is in the northern metropolitan area of Perth and is home to an engaged and connected community of almost 161,000 residents. The City is driven by a vision it shares with its community of being a bold, creative, and prosperous global city.
As a local government, the City of Joondalup is responsible for the delivery of a range of services, events, programs, and infrastructure. This includes the management of Local Laws in relation to animal services, community amenity management, parking compliance and facilities. The management of these areas is overseen by the Rangers, Parking and Community Safety Business Unit.
The restructure of the Rangers, Community Safety and Parking Team, sparked the City to look at making a change away from parking enforcement in favour of education. This resulted in the recruitment of fifteen Field Officers with a focus on customer service experience, to replace the traditional Rangers and Parking Inspector roles. The restructure was an opportunity to implement cultural changes to shift away from a strict law enforcement approach towards a greater emphasis being placed on educating and informing
the community.
Presenting a unique opportunity, the City promoted this cultural shift to the community in a unique way. A trial at Christmas time around local primary schools and a more public launch on Valentine’s Day, where Field Officers hit the Joondalup City Centre with a new love themed style of caution notice. The notice featuring a quirky poem, a social media hashtag, and a pay it forward message and most importantly, no fine.
The City coincided the promotion with a strategically targeted media campaign which resulted in talkback radio coverage, a feature story on Channel 7 news in Perth, and features in local newspaper Perth Now’s online. The City is proud of the initiative, with it being the first parking story to be received so positively by the community, with an overwhelming number of likes, loves, shares and positive comments on various social media channels.
The City received an advertising space rate (ASR) or unpaid media of almost $50,000. The #Nofinetoday hashtag resulted in with seven uses and the combined Facebook channels of 7 News Perth, Perth Now, City of Joondalup resulted in a combination of 446 likes, comments, and shares.
The LinkedIn posts resulted in a combination of 533 likes, comments, and shares with eastern states local governments also tagged in comments including the Lord Mayor and CEO of City of Melbourne and other high-profile local governments executive and elected members from across Australia, with Joondalup setting the bar for peer local governments to follow.
Further unique communication strategies will be undertaken following the success of the Valentine’s Day communications campaign. The community supported the concept and found it to be innovative and fun. It successfully met the objective of educating the community and supported the shift away from harsh enforcement to a more lenient and educational approach.
For more information about the City of Joondalup, visit joondalup.wa.gov.au