Skills Funding Agency Social Media Policy
The broad principles of this policy apply to all social media sites, the details below apply to Twitter as this is currently the Agency’s most active social media channel.
The Skills Funding Agency (‘The Agency’) is a partner organisation of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It funds and regulates adult further education and skills in England.
Twitter
The @skillsfunding Twitter account is managed by the Press Office, on behalf of the Agency.
The Agency does not use any automation (such as tools which generate tweets from RSS feeds) to post content on Twitter.
If you follow us, you can expect between 1-5 tweets a day covering, amongst other issues:
- Alerts about new content on our other digital channels (news, publications, videos, speeches, publicity campaigns etc)
- Invitations to provide feedback on specific research issues or consultations which we are undertaking
- Information on our Chief Executive
- Occasional live coverage of events
- Retweets from Twitter accounts that are linked to the Agency – including services aimed at consumers that the Agency manages but that require their own dedicated social media channels
- Sector news
Following Individuals or Organisations on Twitter
The Agency does not automatically follow back new followers. @Skillsfunding will follow organisations of relevance to The Agency and the skills sector, and may follow individuals where appropriate. The Press Office reserves the right to ‘unfollow’ accounts we believe are malicious, spam or wholly unconnected with our work.
Being followed back does not imply endorsement of any kind.
Availability
The Agency will update and monitor our Twitter account on a daily basis during office hours. As part of out-of-hours press office duty, the Agency will, on occasion, monitor and respond to emerging issues. Twitter may occasionally be unavailable and The Agency accepts no responsibility for lack of service due to Twitter downtime.
@Replies and Direct Messages
The Agency welcomes feedback and ideas from its followers, and endeavours to add value to conversations where it can. However, the Agency is not able to reply individually to all the messages we receive via Twitter.
The Press Office reads all @replies and Direct Messages and ensures that any emerging themes or helpful suggestions are passed to the relevant people in The Agency.
The Agency cannot engage on issues of party politics or debate Government policy.
The preferred way of contacting The Agency is detailed in the contact us section of our website.
Staff of the Skills Funding Agency using social media sites
Agency staff are civil servants and are bound by the Civil Service Management Code. It’s likely that some staff will use one or more social media sites. They do so as private citizens and their comments are their own views and not those of the Agency. They will make this clear in details that they provide about themselves in any profile or biography.
Some senior civil servants and those deemed to be in sensitive roles are prevented from commenting on Government policy or party political matters in any public arena, including social media channels.
Some Agency staff have access to social media sites during the course of their work. Agency communications staff manage and respond as appropriate. Other Agency staff who have access to these same sites do so to monitor the work of regional and local stakeholders. In line with the Code, during the course of their work, Agency staff will not use their profiles on these sites to engage in public debate about Government policy or party political matters.
The Skills Funding Agency reserves the right to create, amend or delete any of the social media accounts that they manage without prior warning. All content is regarded as being in the public domain.
The Agency also reserves the right to amend or withdraw this policy at anytime.
