[JUDGING] Central Bank of Ireland
Section: Public Sector Social Media Team of the Year
Organisation Name: Central Bank of Ireland
Team Questions
Organisation Name
Central Bank of Ireland
Structure Of The Team And Their Roles
The Digital Engagement team is part of Central Bank of Ireland’s Engagement and Communications division. Winner of 30 digital awards since 2020, the team has a strong track record in digital communications, content, innovation and social media.
We develop social media and website content to support Central Bank of Ireland’s strategic theme of “Open & Engaged”, with a key focus on building “a wider understanding of what the Central Bank does, and why.” Our content aims to engage, explain and educate our audiences about our role to maintain monetary and financial stability while protecting consumers.
By creating awareness on social media, and building understanding via plain language content that explains complex topics, our ultimate aim is to build greater trust of the Central Bank as an institution.
The team has very broad responsibilities, and has three sub-teams that work together to deliver on agreed objectives: Digital Publishing, Brand & Design, and Digital Content & Marketing.
The Brand & Design and Digital Content & Marketing colleagues, in particular, work closely together to write, produce, translate, design and measure content for our social media channels, with a balanced mix of seasoned professionals and early career professionals who help deliver the strategy.
Give Examples Of Your Content Creation Process
Our team collaborates with colleagues in the wider division as well as across the Bank, and with other organisations and content creators to ensure our approach is aligned with the Bank’s strategic priorities.
We have built significant in-house capabilities from the ground up. For example:
- We brought all design and brand work in-house and have built a brand aligned with best practice in any industry.
- We built in-house online advertising expertise, allowing us to create and launch low-medium cost, effective and very measurable digital campaigns that have completely transformed our ability to reach target audiences and drive tangible results at scale.
- We have brought much of our video production in-house – developing many (but not all) of our videos in-house.
- We have taken a more strategic approach to translation, ensuring that many of our public campaigns are launched simultaneously in English and Irish.
All of these have evolved further and significantly in the past year.
Most importantly, we have built a culture of collaboration, trust, support and innovation that allows our team to learn and develop in their roles while delivering exceptional results both individually and collectively. Culture is the most important driver of our success as a team.
How Are Your Measuring Success Reach Links Traffic Etc
Our more significant social media campaigns are usually part of integrated communications plans, with clear objectives, which would often include reach (impressions), video views, completion rates (videos), target audiences, website visits, awareness (measurable via monthly, independent research), media coverage, trust scores, and positive or neutral sentiment from stakeholders. We also attribute key actions to social media activity where possible e.g. numbers of survey responses received, number of consultation responses received, number of job or competition applications.
At a macro level, we monitor and record engagement with all our posts on our channels – we identify our most/least successful posts each month and use this data to inform our general approach and to identify themes such as areas of interest to the public. We take a forensic look at what is driving channel growth and we try to do more of what we know works for us.
We conduct monthly research to understand levels of public awareness of our activities and to assess how our content is influencing trust of the organisation, and we publish online surveys on some campaign landing pages to get first-hand user experience on the content.
Perhaps most importantly, we try to measure success by how we are developing people in their roles while continuing to ensure we maintain the culture that underpins our success.
Give Three Examples Of Recent Updates Or Initiatives That Have Worked Well Link To Them And Give Some Metrics On Them
With team members working seamlessly together, we produced the Consumer Protection Code campaign senior leader video in-house (including scripting, filming, and post production). The video garnered almost 7,000 organic views, completion rates of 38% on YouTube, 36 reposts on LinkedIn and very positive comments on LinkedIn in particular: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7442164233942962176. The overall series of Code campaign videos, managed by the team and supported by paid advertising, reached 5.9 million people on social media.
Our annual scams campaign (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7393603935233687553 ) saw us work across the team to produce a number of new assets to highlight new types of scams and how to avoid them. Working with subject matter experts across the Bank, we produced all assets fully in-house in both English and Irish, with content, design, video production, and translation skills deployed across the campaign, which reached 2.34 million people on Instagram alone.
Our Graduate Programme campaign for 2026 shattered all previous records (increasing job applications by 23% vs previous year) via a mixture of new and repurposed assets on social media in a campaign that was expertly managed by the team across a range of social channels: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7376616634951684096
Why Are You Deserving Of Team Of The Year
The Digital Engagement team operates as a highly-motivated, cohesive, collaborative unit – with a laser focus on innovation and quality outcomes.
The team is continuously raising the bar and pushing itself in terms of the content it produces, the audiences it is reaching, the engagement it is fostering and the direct impact its work has on helping the Central Bank to achieve its strategic objectives.
For example, we have recently opened our Instagram up to user generated content in the form of our #EUCoinChallenge (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbSwnpaFCob), which is a very unique social media campaign for a national central bank. Although the campaign will run for many more weeks, our feed already highlights the innovative approach we are taking – with content from our own people and Irish embassies across the EU being used to inspire creative submissions from the public. Underpinned by social media advertising managed completely in-house, the campaign video has already reached over 665,000 people while garnering over 4,600 Likes. The team conceived the idea for the Challenge and are wholly responsible for managing all aspects of it.
Furthermore, our focus on bilingual content shows that we don’t treat translation as a legislative obligation but as a cornerstone of our strategic approach, as evidenced by recent campaigns: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXRNgEujeE0