This report (download link) reports the results of a survey, carried out in early 2022, of the public internet presences of potentially over 1300 Scottish community councils. It gives an update a decade after similar surveys in 2012 and 2014 (Ryan & Cruickshank, 2012, 2014). This report focuses on the timeliness and content of community council websites, and the timeliness of community councils’ Facebook and X/Twitter presences.

Searchable maps visualising the findings are available online.

In summary, there has been little positive change since the 2014, except that the number of CCs with public Facebook presences has increased noticeably.

The 1360 potential community councils can be classified as follows:

• 224 (16%) do not exist. The equivalent data for previous years are 2012: 222 (16%); 2014: 211 (15%).
• 354 (26%) exist but are not online. Previous years 2012: 498 (36%); 2014: 503 (37%)
• 292 (21%) have out-of-date online presences. Previous years 2012: 357 (26%); 2014: 348 (25%)
• 490 (22%) have up-to-date online presences. Previous years 2012: 294 (21%); 2014: 307 (22%). Of these 490 presences, only 179 had also been up to date in 2014, showing that CCs continue to have major problems with maintaining their online presences.

Only 345 presences (70% of up-to-date presences) clearly present planning information, despite the importance of the roles CC in representing the views of their citizens and responding to planning applications.

Thanks in part to social media and blog-based websites, most CCs that are online in any way have some form or online presence suitable for mobile devices.

There has been a significant increase in CCs’ use of social media since 2014: 511 CCs had public Facebook pages in 2022, compared to only 128 in 2014. 202 CCs had Twitter presences in 2022, compared to 55 in 2014.

Implementation of the 2012 and 2014 recommendations is incomplete. New recommendations focus on how CCs might publish planning material to support their input to planning processes, on ways to improve the overall online performance of CCs, and on continuing to improve CCs use of social media. However it is acknowledged that this calls for more human resources than CCs currently have.