Trust Board meetings sometimes aren't the most engaging or interactive of experiences, and any meeting that takes place in one place in one town will be limited in the number of people it can reach.At The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SATH) we're on a journey, using social media to take our meetings outside the room and bring communities (real and virtual) into the room.
I'll be honest that we're not sure yet where that journey will take us, but sometimes the exploration is necessary and you reach a destination you never anticipated. My first step was to share the progress of the Board meeting with colleagues.
I set up an intranet page and added milestones as they happened. A bit static, a bit one way, but it was good to get feedback from people who appreciated it.
Next I started doing this on both our intranet (for colleagues) and our website (for the world). OK-ish but it was actually quite confusing keep up with two "live blogs" and they still felt very "broadcasty".
Right about this time we were starting to use Twitter (@sathNHS and @sathAdrianO), so I began to Tweet the updates from the Board. Again, OK, but our hospital networks and software don't always make it easy to access social media.
So, where I'm up to now is combining Twitter with Live Blogging (using Storify as the platform). The Tweets (#sathBoard) allow me to share progress from the meeting, tag people and organisations who may be interested in the business of the day (including tagging Board colleagues when they are presenting their papers - that works fine except if they've forgotten to turn notifications off ... so each time they say something their phone bleeps), interact with their tweets and also invite twitter contributions to our "questions from the floor" at the end of the meeting.
Alongside this, the Tweets and replies are curated into a live blog (e.g. https://storify.com/Sathcomms/live-blog-from-the-trust-board-meeting-3-december-) so that the world can dip and dip out at leisure rather than have to follow it in real time. The blogs are also embedded on our website and intranet to widen the reach.
Our December meeting blog has attracted over 600 views on Storify - over 300 on Storify itself (e.g. people following the link in a Tweet), 150 via our intranet and 150 via the website.
Yep, the numbers could be bigger but it is still a lot more than we have in the room for the meeting. I make no claims that this is world-changing and that we have reached our destination, but I am glad that something I was doing anyway (recording the Board for colleagues) now has the potential to connect a lot more people with our Board.
I'd welcome any feedback and also love to hear how other small teams are using #SocMed to connect communities with their Board.