Borrow What Works: The Case for Proven-Practice Discovery in Local Government Communications

Every week, thousands of cities, towns and counties try out post ideas in public, and residents vote on them with likes, comments and shares. That makes local government social media one of the largest open libraries of tested ideas anywhere. We call the habit of searching that library, finding what has worked for governments like yours, and adapting it proven-practice discovery. This piece explains why it works, drawing on fifty years of research on how governments learn from each other and on 1 million posts from 5,834 local governments in 2026.

The short version.

Governments have always learned from each other. Research on policy diffusion shows cities and states copy what their peers do. The copying pays off when it is learning (borrowing what demonstrably worked) rather than imitation (borrowing what is popular).
Recurring post series are the clearest case on social media. A post celebrating an employee’s milestone typically draws 5.6× the engagement of the same page’s typical post, and 79% of them beat it. Throwback Thursday posts run at 2.8×, photo-of-the-week posts at 2.2×.
Some popular series don’t work. Adoptable-pet posts, day-of-week hashtags, weekly tips and week-in-review recaps all land below the page’s own typical post. Being common is not the same as working.
The same formats appear in hundreds of feeds. “That’s a wrap” event recaps come from 251 governments in 45 states and draw 2.5× the page’s usual engagement; “The wait is over” posts, 207 governments and 2.4×.
Governments say they borrow. In January, 36 governments in 18 states posted their own take on the “2026 is the new 2016” trend, 29 of them in the same three weeks, many with the identical opening line. Others credit a named neighbor or answer a peer’s challenge.
Good ideas spread peer to peer. Among 4,129 governments that posted every month this year, employee spotlights went from 244 governments in January–March to 426 in July–September. Governments were about twice as likely to start one in a given month if another government in their state already had.

Proven-practice discovery is what GovFeeds is built for. Search more than 1.4 million posts from over 5,000 local governments, filter to governments like yours, and see which posts beat their page’s usual engagement, so you can borrow the format with confidence.

Subscribe from $80/mo → Get a free benchmark report

In this piece: What the research says · Recurring series that work · The same formats in hundreds of feeds · Eight posts worth borrowing · Format reuse in the wild · Common is not the same as proven · How good ideas spread · What we see in our own subscribers · How to practice it · How we measured · References

What the research says about governments learning from each other

Political scientists have studied how ideas move between governments for more than fifty years, under the name policy diffusion. Four findings matter most for a communicator.

Local governments learn from their peers, and learning is only one of the ways ideas travel. Charles Shipan and Craig Volden followed antismoking rules across the 675 largest U.S. cities from 1975 to 2000. They found four distinct channels at work: learning from cities that adopted earlier, economic competition with nearby cities, imitation of larger cities, and pressure from state governments. Imitation was the most short-lived of the four, and larger cities were better positioned to learn (Shipan & Volden 2008).

Governments copy what succeeded, not just what is nearby. In a study titled Emulating Success, Volden showed that states adopted children’s health insurance policies that had worked elsewhere, and that they looked to states similar to themselves rather than simply to their neighbors (Volden 2006). Experiments with U.S. municipal officials point the same way. Officials who were skeptical of a policy became more willing to learn from another city when the policy’s success was emphasized (Butler, Volden, Dynes & Shor 2017).

Copying can also spread the wrong things. In Why Bad Policies Spread (and Good Ones Don’t), Shipan and Volden argue that good ideas win out only when results are visible, there is time to learn, and decision-makers have the incentives and expertise to use the evidence. Without those conditions, imitation and competition can carry weak ideas just as easily (Shipan & Volden 2021). Sociologists describe a related pattern. When organizations are uncertain, they model themselves on peers that look successful or legitimate, whether or not the borrowed practice improves results (DiMaggio & Powell 1983).

Communication itself diffuses. It is not only policies that travel. In newspaper coverage of smoking restrictions, the way an issue was framed in one state was predicted by what other states had already done (Gilardi, Shipan & Wüest 2021). Government social media spread the same way. Agencies began with informal experiments by a few enthusiasts and only later settled into shared norms and policies (Mergel & Bretschneider 2013). Dutch municipalities took up websites, Twitter and YouTube at different speeds that depended on their size, structure and existing tools (Faber 2022).

One more line of research ties this back to day-to-day work. In the North Carolina Benchmarking Project, the cities that actually used comparative performance data to improve services stood out in three ways: the kinds of measures they relied on, their officials’ willingness to embrace comparison with other governments, and how far they built the measures into their management systems (Ammons & Rivenbark 2008). Comparison does not help by itself. It helps when someone looks at what worked and acts on it.

For social media this suggests a simple discipline. Look at what peers are doing, judge it by results rather than popularity, and adapt the ideas that hold up. That is proven-practice discovery.

Recurring series: the clearest place to borrow

The easiest ideas to borrow are repeat styles, recurring formats a government runs every week or month under the same name. They are easy to spot in another government’s feed, cheap to produce, and residents learn to look for them. Research on European local government Facebook pages has long found that engagement depends heavily on the type of content and media a page posts (Bonsón, Royo & Ratkai 2015). Recurring series let you test a content type again and again.

We identified twelve common recurring series in 2026 posts from 5,834 local governments. For every post, we compared its engagement (likes + comments + shares) with the same page’s typical post this year. That way a small town’s page and a large county’s page are each measured against themselves.

Median, across 2026 posts in each series, of the post’s engagement divided by the posting page’s median engagement for 2026. Teal = clearly above the page’s typical post; tan = below it. Memorial and tragedy posts are excluded from every series.

Series	Governments using it (2026)	Typical post vs page’s own	Share beating the page’s typical post
Milestones: work anniversaries, retirements	743 (12.7%)	5.6×	79%
Throwback Thursday / Flashback Friday	319 (5.5%)	2.8×	73%
Photo of the week	32 (0.5%)	2.2×	78%
Guess-where photo challenges	96 (1.6%)	2.2×	70%
Behind the scenes / day in the life	2,087 (35.8%)	1.7×	61%
Local business spotlights	187 (3.2%)	1.6×	57%
Employee and crew spotlights	926 (15.9%)	1.4×	55%
Fun Fact Friday / trivia	100 (1.7%)	1.2×	53%
Adoptable pet of the week	212 (3.6%)	0.9×	43%
Day-of-week hashtags (#MotivationMonday)	48 (0.8%)	0.7×	42%
Weekly tips (Tip Tuesday)	93 (1.6%)	0.7×	33%
Week-in-review recaps	50 (0.9%)	0.5×	29%

The series at the top share a pattern. They are about people and places residents already know: a bus driver, a crew, an old photo of a familiar corner, a local store. They also give residents something easy to do, like congratulating someone, sharing a memory or guessing a location. Milestone posts are the standout. They are also among the cheapest posts a communicator can make, because HR already knows the dates.

The same formats in hundreds of feeds

Repeat formats are easiest to see in how posts open. Hundreds of governments that have never coordinated start their posts with the same few words, because the framing works and spreads. We grouped 2026 posts by their opening words and left out any opening whose posts were mostly identical text shared between governments (press releases and state alerts), so what remains are formats each government wrote in its own words.

Post opens with	Governments	States	Typical post vs page’s own
“That’s a wrap…” (event recap)	251	45	2.5×
“The wait is over…” (opening day)	207	42	2.4×
“Step back in time…” (local history)	134	34	1.7×
“Who’s ready for…” (event teaser)	171	41	1.3×
“Scam alert”	612	49	1.2×
“The countdown is on…”	383	45	1.1×
“Did you know…” (explainer)	1,614	51	1.0×
“In case you missed it”	405	45	1.0×
“Know before you go”	114	30	1.0×
“Have you ever wondered…”	112	35	0.8×
“Help shape the future…” (survey ask)	448	46	0.7×
“We want to hear…” (feedback ask)	278	44	0.7×

The same framing turns up from Florida to Utah, and the results sort the same way as the recurring series. The recap and the opening-day announcement, both about something residents enjoyed or waited for, beat the page’s usual post. The survey and feedback asks fall below it. Here are three of the strongest, each from three governments in three states.

“That’s a wrap”: the event recap

Escambia County, FL
July 18, 2026 · Facebook

That’s a wrap on the 2026 Pensacola Beach Air Show! 💙✈️

Borrow What Works: The Case for Proven-Practice Discovery in Local Government Communications

What the research says about governments learning from each other

Recurring series: the clearest place to borrow

The same formats in hundreds of feeds

Eight posts worth borrowing

Format reuse in the wild: governments say so themselves

Common is not the same as proven

How good ideas spread from one government to the next

What we see in our own subscribers

How to practice proven-practice discovery

Start practicing proven-practice discovery this week

How we measured

References

Frequently asked questions

Borrow what works from 5,000+ local governments.