Social workers are often criticised by the public, media, and politicians. But the 10-strong Community Care editorial team are passionate about championing social workers, and supporting them with the challenges they face.

At the start of 2023, Community Care, which publishers content across a free daily news site and two subscription learning resources – faced a challenge common to many B2B brands: an extremely time-poor professional audience.

The editorial team had three main goals:

• Reach a younger audience of social work students and newly-qualified workers
• Reverse their declining traffic figures
• Deliver a content-led campaign – Choose Social Work – aimed at inspiring the next generation of practitioners

The team developed a strategy of transforming their content away from written articles and guides towards a mix of formats that allowed practitioners to access the content when and how they need it. This included a live webinar series providing expert learning, short-form video content, infographics, and newsletter courses.

User surveys informed the team that readers wanted to hear directly from other social workers and people with lived experience of services. They met this need by:

• Publishing a series of letters offering advice from practitioners and managers
• Working with a care-experienced author to produce a video series, talking to care leavers and residents of a rehabilitation facility
• A new monthly podcast where they speak to frontline practitioners about the issues impacting them

In June 2023, the Choose Social Work campaign launched, tackling the existing challenge facing the sector: the lack of practitioners. In fact, one in five children’s social work posts lie vacant. The campaign spanned more than 30 articles, videos, podcast episodes, and interviews. They addressed social work’s status as a scapegoat for society, interviewing figures like Sharon Shoesmith. They shadowed social workers and talked to care-experienced celebrities like Fatima Whitbread. And they showed the brave, inspiring, emotional work that social workers do every day.

The work paid off. In August 2023, the team commissioned an external researcher to conduct a user survey, including a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of communitycare.co.uk. They achieved an NPS of+39 (an increase from +30 in the last iteration of the survey in January 2020). They also saw a significant improvement in the NPS score given by early career social workers; in 2020, this cohort gave an NPS of +36, but in August 2023, this jumped to +52.

Since August 2023, the team have seen page views, users, and sessions consistently up year-on-year. For example, in November 2023, page views on communitycare.co.uk were up 11.9% from the previous year, users were up 20.4%, and returning users were up 8.3%.

More than 8,000 people registered to attend their webinar series, and the team achieved an average star rating of 4.9/5 for the content and 4.7/5 for the speakers.

The hard work, collaboration, and creativity of the team ensure that, in their 50^th year of publication, they are fulfilling the purpose Community Care was created for: to represent the interests of social workers and the people they support.

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