Social media policy

During the working day (Monday-Friday 9am-5pm) staff in our Customer Hub are on hand to help with enquiries.

Our accounts are monitored outside of working hours by the duty communications officer, who is on standby to deal with emergencies and incidents. However, we are not able to respond to all enquiries outside of working hours – all non-urgent enquiries will be dealt with during the next working day.

During incidents, we will do our best to share regular, factual information on the latest situation. We are likely to be very busy during this period so we may take a little longer to get back to you.

House rules

People care passionately about the environment, and it’s great to hear people talking about it, and our work on our social channels. But please keep in mind these rules when posting on our accounts.

Do:

• Engage in polite conversation with our staff and other users
• Respect the opinions of others
• Share accurate, truthful information
• Remember that the people who monitor our accounts are not specialists in all areas of NRW’s work

 Don’t:

• Post abusive, offensive or defamatory comments – these will be deleted
• Make personal or offensive comments about our staff (we are only human)
• Speculate on live investigations or ongoing court cases
• Post anything that you don’t have the copyright permission to use
• Spam us by posting the same content repeatedly (persistent negative or abusive posts which aim to provoke a response)

Please don't spoil it for everyone else

We don’t want to block anyone from our accounts and will only do this as a last resort. But if individuals consistently break the rules, or cause major disruption on our accounts we will have no choice.

Responding to your messages

We like to engage with our followers and do our best to respond wherever we can, but we deal with a large volume of traffic through our accounts, so we can’t always respond to every comment we receive.

We read every message where we are mentioned, or that we receive as a direct message, and we will always try to answer all relevant questions that are asked to us.

We will try to answer these as soon as possible, however, please bear in mind that some areas of our work are technical and complex, and may take longer for us to get a response for you. Where appropriate, we will share the messages we receive with other colleagues in the organisation to make sure that you get the correct answers.

Reporting incidents

It may be quick and easy to report incidents to us through social media but it’s not the quickest way to reach us, and we won’t always get all the information we need to investigate.

Please report incidents to our hotline number on 0300 065 3000.

Making complaints

We don’t think social media is the right place to log a formal complaint, so if you do wish to do so, please follow this guidance.