Delivering the annual canvass - Scotland

What is an e-communication and when can I use it?

An e-communication could be an email, SMS text message or another type of electronic or digital communication, such as a communication through internal accounts used to communicate with electors about other local authority services. A response is required to an e-communication, even if there are no changes to report.

Whilst the e-communication you send must inform the recipient of the requirement to respond, you need only receive a response from one recipient of an e-communication within a household to meet the response requirement for that property.

An e-communication provides you with an opportunity to encourage a response from a property to update the information you hold on the register via an alternative channel than by post. This could potentially lead to resource savings.

To use an e-communication you must have the relevant contact details for at least one of the electors aged 16 or over registered in the household.1

You can still use an e-communication if you only hold contact details for some but not all registered electors at a property, although you must send an e-communication to all electors aged 16 or over whose contact details you do have.2

Using a mixture of e-communication methods

You can, if you wish, use different types of e-communications for different properties: for example, you could choose to send a mixture of emails and text messages or any other type of e-communication to different properties depending on the contact data you hold.

You can also send a mixture of e-communications within a household. However, there is no requirement to use more than one type of e-communication to contact a property so, for example, if you hold email addresses for some individuals and mobile numbers for others, you could decide only to use e-mail contact, in which case you would only need to send the e-communication to those individuals with email addresses.

Choosing which types of e-communication method(s) to use

When deciding which, if any, e-communication method to use, you should consider:

• whether you hold the information necessary to use the contact method you are considering, or if you are able to obtain and use contact information from any other sources in line with data protection considerations
• the number of individuals you hold the necessary information for
• how confident you are that the contact data you hold is accurate and up to date
• the capacity that your local authority has for sending out bulk emails/SMS messages 
• whether to send out e-communications in batches in order to help manage the workload created by a high number of responses
• how you will process responses received through different communication channels, including queries from electors 
• what steps you will take to be sure that any communication channels you use and any actions taken comply with data protection legislation
• how you will ensure that electors will know that e-communications you send are genuine, so they can be confident in responding accordingly

You cannot use e-communications for any empty and void properties as these properties do not contain any registered electors for you to contact electronically.