Part 5 of Global Community Engagement Day

5 min readFeb 2, 2022

Lady holding a globe at her side. By Ben White on Unsplash — By Ben White on Unsplash

It may only be the 5th year we have instigated the annual Global Community Engagement Day on 28 January but wow we are in love. The growth of the day, and I won’t lie with no or very little promotion from me or co-facilitator Becky, continues to amaze us. After the initial slow burn first year and the difficult second album second year we have seen a steady year on year growth in the number of countries, organisations and individuals getting involved and the quality of content is inspiring. We do want to thank everyone who took part, whether it was your first time posting to celebrate the day or your 5th, we do appreciate it and your work in shining a light on the importance of community engagement.

Plus honestly, if we could hire someone to manage all the data and the content we see each year, even if just for 1 day, for a better review we would because my stats below are based on my rules.

So let’s take a quick look at how we did this year and shout out some of the content we saw across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

40 — the number of Countries where we saw contributions from this year (9 more than last year)
Countries such as Trinidad & Tobago, Russia and Mauritius engaged for the first time
Texas — not the lone ‘star’ state in participating but was by far the best when it came to the number of contributors from the US. In fact I think I saw at least one post come from each State
5,000,000 followers — the number of followers the biggest organisations who participated have between them — Pfizer and American Express Business
Round of applause to WSP — who encouraged its comms and engagement teams to take part across the globe and boy did they deliver. Their employees posted the most individual and in some cases very personal and proud moment content
The day was called ‘obscure’ and referred to ‘the elephant in the room’
142,000 followers — the number of people may have seen our GCED video with Dr Wendy Sarkissian as it was showcased by ‘Just Adelaide things’ on Instagram
LinkedIn — the clear winner this year when it came to number of posts and submissions on a platform, but generally their were 1000’s of posts across all social media platforms (far too many to count)
#globalcommunityengagemenday was the key hashtag but again #communityengagementday and #commengageday were also used by some

Some other great things we saw included:

Old friends — shared some great content like Natalie Wadwell and Ayesha Twyman
We also saw many posts from previous year contributors such as Bradwell B nuclear power station and Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter School but sadly none from last years firm favourites, East Yorkshire Buses and the National Space Centre (UK)
New friends — we welcomed some great new contributors such as a budding Mars Astronaut (Abigail Harrison), the Milwaukee Ballet and Ballet Arizona and also the Welsh National Opera — who posted in both English and Welsh
Languages — we saw other languages used beyond English (that I could work out) including Finnish, Welsh, Russian, Iranian, Dutch and French but no día mundial de participación de la comunidad!
Government participation — All levels of government were represented from local, to state and even national
While most content was on point, we did see a little spam relating to Crypto currency and also businesses blatantly using the hashtag as promotion — #boo

Finally, one thing that really did shine through much stronger this year than any other year, was the number of community based content. Posts by community groups covering things like volunteering, cleaning up rivers and supporting children to read schemes. Posts by people proud of their role in the community engagement practice including government officers, Nurses and university alumni but most significantly one post that was actually in response to a company taking part in community engagement day.

EirGrid (Ireland’s State owned electricity grid) did an amazing job on both Twitter and LinkedIn introducing its community engagement team and thanking those in the community who engage in their processes. In conversation on Twitter I discovered that as part of their new engagement strategy, communities are being placed at the heart of everything they do, with some exciting partnerships and initiatives proposed in 2022.

What we didn’t expect was to then see a community group — Protect Rural Ireland — actually then respond to their GCED tweets in protest. Unhappy with the trust for the company in the community, they used Global Community Engagement Day to call them out. A true perspective on why putting community back into community engagement is important now more than ever and relates very much to the Vlog we did where we talked about why building a relationship with industry experts in organisations actually helps build trust in your processes. While there was no response on the day, it will be interesting to watch. It’s great to see community groups like this use social media to point out flaws organisations still have when they say they are engaging the community. We’d love to see more.

So, another year done. What shall we do for next year? Again, this year’s theme came late in the day and every year we talk about being more prepared a little earlier. If you’d like to help please let us know and if you have a theme idea send them through.

Goals for next year: