Could One Smart Tool Save Your Council Valuable Hours?
When manual social media archiving ate up work hours, this council found a smarter, time-saving solution.
When manual social media archiving ate up work hours, this council found a smarter, time-saving solution.
Cessnock City Council faced a mounting challenge: keeping track of social media records across multiple teams and social media platforms while ensuring compliance with NSW’s State Records Act. The process became complex and time-consuming.
Before Brolly, tracking social media activity was manual and time-intensive:
“The person who created the post was responsible for saving it, but it meant records visibility and management was out of our hands,”
Amanda Hillman, Record Management Coordinator at Cessnock City Council.
Accuracy and compliance were at risk, but a key issue? Time. It would take hours each month to manually capture social media records.
The Council had tried another archiving tool, but it failed to integrate with their existing records system, Content Manager.
After reviewing their options, they discovered Brolly.
“We liked what Brolly offered,” Amanda explained. “Being Australian-owned with data locally stored – and knowing other councils who face challenges similar to ours use Brolly – gave us confidence in making the switch.”
Cessnock City Council implemented Brolly in late 2021, using scheduled monthly exports to capture records. While this met their recordkeeping requirements, not all records needed saving into Content Manager.
The Council trialled the Content Manager integration, gaining greater control over what was archived:
“We didn’t want to save everything in Content Manager, especially short-term promotional content. The ability to select what we keep has been a huge improvement,”
Amanda Hillman, Record Management Coordinator at Cessnock City Council.
Since implementing Brolly, the results speak for themselves:
“Before Brolly, if a post had any additional comments or edits after the initial screenshot, we weren’t seeing or capturing that. Now, we get everything,”
Amanda Hillman, Record Management Coordinator at Cessnock City Council.
For Amanda, the biggest takeaway is how seamlessly Brolly has integrated into their workflow.
“It’s straightforward, and it just works,” she explains. “We don’t miss a thing.”
And, unlike previous tools, Brolly has lived up to expectations.
“It was simple to set up, easy to use, and has never faltered.”
For this council, Brolly has become a time-saving, compliance-assuring essential.