“Communities have the opportunity to bring information together in one place to address the weaknesses of social media and reinvigorate community websites.”
This is the first in my Building Community Websites series. It aims to provide practical, researched guides to help communities improve their existing websites and social media presence. In this article, I present the opportunity for digital noticeboards to reinvigorate community websites.
1. Communities have increasingly embraced social media, seemingly leaving a diminished role for community websites
It has been a challenging time for those running community websites, increasingly faced with the adoption of social media. Keeping a village website running can take considerable time from volunteers, who need the technical confidence to build it, manage it and prepare updates. Ashley Franklin’s account of setting up the Milford and Makeney website describes precisely that difficulty: the community had the ambition, but initially lacked the time and technical know-how to deliver it. [1]
It is not surprising that social media offered community organisations an attractive proposition: publish something quickly, let people respond and allow them to share it with others. Instead of asking everyone to visit a village website, an announcement could appear where people were already spending their time. It is easy to see why that would attract both residents and the volunteers running a website. Participation became immediate, and the response was visible. Facebook could take on activities previously centred on the community site.
The wider shift has been substantial. Ofcom found that the proportion of online adults reporting a social-media profile or account rose from 72% in 2014 to 82% in 2019. By 2024, around nine in ten online adults used social media. [2] Reuters Institute research in 2025 found that UK consumers of information about local activities and culture regarded social media as the best source. [3]
A village may now have several Facebook groups alongside WhatsApp conversations and other platforms, each carrying its own information. In my own village of around 600 people [4], the Spaldwick website has been joined by three general Facebook groups for the village, plus additional Facebook groups for the parish council, school, playgroup, the Social Group, the church, and several other groups.
That leaves community websites facing a different environment from the one in which they were created. But the question I want to explore is whether social media has actually provided the complete community information service people need—or whether its shortcomings create a substantial new opportunity for those websites.
2. Why social media falls short of a community’s needs
Access is lower than people assume
The first problem is the difference between having a following and reaching it. A local organisation can attract followers, publish regularly and still have only a small audience for an individual announcement.
Socialinsider’s September 2026 study reports an average unpaid reach rate of around 4% for smaller Facebook Pages: that’s roughly four accounts reached for every hundred followers. [5] If a Page’s following represents half a village, that benchmark gives an illustrative reach equivalent to a paltry 2% or so of the village population. So, while the following may look impressive, the audience for a particular notice may be much smaller.
Another critical issue is inclusion across all age groups. How many people will miss those Facebook posts because they do not use the platform? Almost a quarter of online adults did not use Facebook, according to Ofcom’s figures for 2024. Among internet users aged 65 and over, a quarter did not use social media at all. [2] Children under 13 cannot sign up for Facebook under Meta’s rules. [6]
I think communities are in danger of confusing their presence on social media with access to the community. The meaningful question is how many residents can find or receive the information they need, in time to use it. And it’s not just about access.
The functionality does not actually meet many information needs
The shortcomings become clearer when I look at the information we have been bringing together for Spaldwick: forthcoming events, travel updates, the village magazine, council documents, photographs and local history. These are practical services residents should be able to return to whenever they need them. A succession of social posts does not give them that organised, continuing service. Here are just some examples where social media falls short.
A shared village diary needs one place to submit and find events. Organisers should be able to contribute an activity and residents should be able to see what is coming up across the village, in date order. In a social feed, an announcement can slip out of view long before the event takes place. Separate event posts and groups leave residents to assemble the diary themselves. What is needed is a common calendar, with dates, venues and changes kept together—not simply another place to announce an event. [7]
Traffic and everyday updates need a dependable place to check. Before leaving home, someone wants to know about a road closure or disruption affecting their journey. They need the current position, not an old warning resurfacing without its resolution. The same principle applies to bin collections and changed event arrangements. While a social post can alert people, a maintained information page is needed to give them somewhere to check what applies now.
The village magazine needs to remain a complete, accessible publication. Our monthly village magazine – Spaldwick News – is published as a PDF. A normal Facebook timeline post doesn’t allow for PDF documents to be attached. Turning pages into images requires a lot of effort and changes how the magazine can be read and downloaded. [8, 9]
Meeting minutes and supporting papers need an orderly public record. Residents may want to check what the parish council decided, read an agenda or follow an issue across several meetings. A short social update cannot substitute for the complete documents, identified by meeting date and available later. Authoritative documents need to be easy to reach, without leaving readers searching through announcements or creating extra copies for volunteers to maintain. [10]
Photographs need more than a brief appearance in a feed. People want to revisit a fete, find photographs of their children or explore how the village has changed. Sharing a selection socially can attract attention, but the continuing value comes from being able to find the complete collection and return to it years later. Who is storing those photographs for posterity? [11]
History needs connected stories and source material. An old photograph can prompt useful recollections on social media. Those names, dates and memories then need to be brought together with the photograph and other records. But who is doing that?
These are the reasons I see an opportunity for reinvigorated community websites. We know the information that already matters to residents. Bringing it together, keeping it current and making it available to everyone beyond the life of a post is a substantial service in its own right.
3. Could a digital noticeboard provide the missing piece?
I am very excited by the potential of using a digital noticeboard to reinvigorate community websites and provide a range of information of great value to those communities that social media cannot effectively provide.
A digital noticeboard would be one public page on a community website bringing together useful current information from across the community. Residents could open it without an account, group membership or subscription, see what is relevant now and follow links for further details.
This is the direction I want to develop in Spaldwick. The noticeboard would be the common entry point: an event notice could lead to its diary entry, an announcement to a document, and a history update to a fuller story. Residents would not need to know which organisation or online group held the information before they could discover it.
The idea has a practical precedent. In the Derbyshire website study, Winster’s website manager John Geddes explained that he put a digest of relevant information on the homepage so visitors could find news and events without clicking through the site. [1] That principle remains valuable: bring the useful information to an identifiable place and make it straightforward to consult.
My aim is to:
- Bring together information in high demand on one simple page that is quick to access.
- Automate feeds directly from the best information sources, such as real-time traffic from National Highways, up-to-date weather from the Met Office and bin collection times from Huntingdonshire District Council.
- Bring together, summarise and provide access to key PDF documents, including Spaldwick News and parish council minutes.
- Provide an urgent news alert service.
- Provide a comprehensive diary that is updated automatically and includes school holiday dates.
- Use automation and AI systems to minimise repeated work for contributors.
The opportunity is a common place that everyone can access for the information that matters beyond any one group. Its usefulness will come from bringing that information together and keeping it current.
4. Early gains, with room for village-wide adoption
The good news is that this is all achievable. A first version does not need universal adoption or a comprehensive collection of content to be worthwhile. There are two opportunities to improve things early.
The first is reach. A noticeboard reaching 5% of residents with an announcement would exceed the illustrative audience of around 2% for a Facebook Page discussed earlier, if both reached people within the same useful period. [5] I think that is reason enough to test the opportunity, rather than assume social media has already captured an audience a website cannot match.
The second is the quality of the information service. A single current programme, a joined-up view of upcoming events or a clear notice of a changed venue can already make something easier to find and use. The improvement does not depend on launching every possible feature.
My experience with broadband adoption has shaped how I think about this. Providing access was only part of the work. Explaining what people could do with it, encouraging them and helping them get started mattered enormously. [12] A noticeboard needs the same attention to adoption: useful information, a recognisable address and encouragement from the organisations residents already know.
If 70–80% of the village eventually used it regularly, the potential would be substantial. That is an ambition to build towards. It starts with a focused service that people find valuable enough to revisit and recommend.
The opportunity for community websites is therefore much larger than preserving an old way of publishing. It is to provide a shared information service that current arrangements do not deliver well enough—and to make useful progress before the complete vision is in place.
I will report on my progress. In the meantime, here’s to the reinvigoration of community websites!
Future guides will examine website content, community history archives and practical ways to make better use of volunteers’ time.
Sources and study notes
1. Ashley Franklin, How to set up a village website, Derbyshire Life / Great British Life. Ashley Franklin’s reporting includes the Milford and Makeney start-up difficulties and John Geddes’s homepage digest at Winster. These are specific community experiences from the early-to-mid-2010s.
2. Ofcom, Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes 2025. Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes 2025, printed pp. 23–25. Earlier figures concern profile/account ownership; later figures concern use. The Facebook and age-group figures refer to online adults in 2024. They are not multiplied into the illustrative Page calculation.
3. Richard Fletcher, Local news: How publishers can still provide value in a platform world. 17 June 2025. The UK finding concerns the preferred source among people using information about local activities and culture.
4. About Spaldwick and 100 years of Spaldwick. The About page describes a population of over 600; the history timeline records 631 in the 2011 Census. The article uses around 600 to convey the village’s scale.
5. Socialinsider, Social Media Reach Statistics 2026. 3 September 2026. The study covers 872,075 Facebook and Instagram posts. The smaller-Page benchmark concerns brand Pages with 1,000–5,000 followers and is rounded to around 4% in the article. A following equivalent to half the village gives an illustrative reach of around 2%. Reach can include non-followers and non-residents; the calculation assumes reached accounts represent distinct residents. It is a Page benchmark, not a measured village-Group result. The noticeboard comparison assumes the same useful time period and local audience.
6. Meta, How Do We Know Someone Is Old Enough to Use Our Apps?. 27 July 2021. Meta’s minimum sign-up age is 13.
7. Meta, Introducing Home and Feeds on Facebook. 21 July 2022. Meta explains the ranked Home view and the separate recent-content Feeds view. This supports the distinction between a feed and an organised village diary.
8. Spaldwick News and digital noticeboard. The village website provides the PDF magazine and its archive, alongside bin-collection information. The additional noticeboard functions in the article are Mark’s development aims.
9. Lockerbie Primary School, Loading Files to a Facebook Group. This school’s instructions illustrate PDF uploads through Facebook Group files. Group files differ from ordinary timeline posts and from an openly accessible magazine archive.
10. Spaldwick village website and example council minutes, 19 September 2024. Links to parish-council information and example minutes dated 19 September 2024 (labelled draft) illustrate the full documents discussed in the article.
11. Spaldwick village website: photography archive. The Spaldwick photography archive illustrates the organised collections residents can revisit.
12. My community work and Spaldwick. Mark’s account of his community work and broadband adoption experience. The proposed noticeboard adoption levels are ambitions, not measured results.