Councillor Manda Rigby has just brought the ancient mayorship of Bath into the 21st century. She’s the 793rd citizen to hold that title but the first to launch a Mayoral Twitter feed!
Its link is https://twitter.com/MayorBath and we hope you will all give it a follow.
“We are in the middle of a website update, but in the interim, we have launched ourselves onto Twitter” said Madam Mayor, “as a way of instant communication about what we are doing. Usually it would be full of photos of events, the events are still happening, but think you would all get very bored of photos of Zoom meetings, so for now, fewer photos, more text!”
In a normal year a Mayor might expect to do 500-600 engagements, mainly attending invites from external organisations, hosting civic dignitaries or having Parlour sessions for patronage groups, twinning associations, other local volunteers etc.
This year, the Mayor is on track to do the same number but under the current circumstances they have been self-generated visiting, mainly remotely, schools, care facilities, benches for informal chats in every Ward in the City, interviewing interesting people to go on the website, and singing ‘we wish you a wombling merry Christmas’ on the Age UK organised singing bus at Christmas (ed…she promised not to sing!)
It has become very clear that there is a need for an enhanced online offering, one which will serve the Mayoralty well for a long time. The website enhance and a Twitter feed is just the start! If you have not had a look at the YouTube channel, that is also worth a view https://www.youtube.com/channel/Mayor of Bath Then enter ‘Mayor of Bath’ into the search box and it all opens up!
“Please give us a follow on Twitter,” asked the Mayor, “and look out for our inaugural tweet announcing a project to do with my theme of combatting loneliness at the beginning of February! I would love lots of likes and retweets, there will be a hashtag I would love to get trending in Bath, as connecting with people is very very dear to my heart”.
