4 bilingual social campaign checks for Cardiff under Welsh Language Standards

What to take away

Check one: does the Cardiff campaign meet simultaneous Welsh and English posting?

Simultaneous posting means the Welsh and English versions go live at the same time, not Welsh after English as a tidy-up. For Cardiff public bodies, this is a Standards duty, not a courtesy.

The Standards (No. 1) Regulations 2015 set out the individual duties. They fall into service delivery, policy-making, operational, promotion and record-keeping standards, and each body's compliance notice from the Commissioner lists the ones that bind it, including duties on online content and responses.

A Cardiff council or health board scheduling a campaign should treat the two language versions as one asset with two renditions. If the Welsh text is written after the English post is approved, the gap shows. Reviewers see a Welsh post published hours later and read it as an afterthought.

Practical test: open the scheduling tool and check the timestamps. If the Welsh and English posts carry different send times, the campaign fails this check before it reaches the audience. Teams unsure which jurisdiction applies should start with Mapping UK rules before writing anything.

How to run the simultaneous test

Check two: are Welsh-language replies handled to the same standard?

A bilingual post invites bilingual replies. Under the Standards, a public body in Cardiff should answer a Welsh-language comment or message in Welsh, within the same service standard it applies to English. Monitoring only the English account is a common failure.

Route Welsh replies to a named officer, not to whoever is on duty. If the team has no Welsh speaker available, the reply still needs a Welsh response, even if it is brief and promises a fuller answer later. Silence in Welsh reads as a refusal.

This is where pre-release quality checks help: build reply handling into the same checklist as the post itself, so the campaign is not signed off until someone owns the Welsh inbox. Those checks should include the reply route, not just the published copy.

Steps for reply handling

Check three: is the Welsh Language Commissioner's duty trail documented?

The Welsh Language Commissioner enforces the Standards and can ask a public body to show how it complied. A social campaign that cannot produce its Welsh copy, approvals and reply log is exposed, even if the posts looked right on the day.

The Commissioner's powers to enforce the Standards and to ask for evidence come from the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011, which created the legal framework for imposing duties on organisations in respect of the Welsh language. When a team has to show where a duty comes from, the Measure is the answer; the Standards (No. 1) Regulations 2015 are where the individual duties sit.

Documentation should be boring and complete: the Welsh source text, the approver, the schedule, the reply log, and any deviation with a reason. If a campaign is paused or rolled back, the record should show why.

Teams that record a hold verdict at launch review when a Welsh version is unconfigured are protecting themselves here, because the missing Welsh version is exactly what an evidence request would surface.

What the duty trail should contain

Six documents answer most evidence requests:

A body must provide information requested by the Commissioner about its compliance with the service delivery standards it is under a duty to comply with, so the trail should be complete before anyone asks for it.

Check four: do broadcasters and public bodies apply the same bilingual marketing standard?

Cardiff broadcasters and Cardiff public bodies do not carry identical duties. Public bodies are bound by the Welsh Language Standards; broadcasters are regulated by Ofcom, whose Welsh-language expectations differ. Treating them as one regime causes either over-compliance or gaps.

For a public body, the standard is the Standards. For a broadcaster, the standard is the licence conditions Ofcom sets under the Communications Act 2003 and the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, plus whatever Welsh-language commitments the broadcaster has made itself. Both should still apply the same bilingual marketing discipline to campaign output, because audiences do not see the regulatory boundary.

A useful reference point is how public sector bodies present Welsh-language service pages, such as Cyllid a Thollau EF - GOV.UK, which shows Welsh content treated as a first-class service page rather than a translation. Broadcasters can borrow that discipline without claiming a Standards duty they do not have.

When a broadcaster and a public body co-produce a campaign, agree in writing which regime applies to which output. Put that in the campaign planning template, so the approvals route is clear before anyone writes copy. A single campaign can carry two duty regimes, and the record should say which is which.

What Cardiff public bodies should fix first

Start with the schedule. Simultaneous posting is the check most often failed and the easiest to prove, because the timestamps are already in the tool. Fix that before rewriting any copy.

Next, name the Welsh reply owner. A campaign with no Welsh responder is a campaign with an unmanaged duty, and the gap will show in the reply log.

Then tighten the duty trail. If the Commissioner asked tomorrow for the Welsh copy, the approval and the reply log, the team should be able to produce all three within a working day.

Finally, settle the broadcaster question in writing. Cardiff media partnerships are common, and a co-produced campaign should state which regime covers which output before launch.

Mapping rules onto a multilingual campaign, geography first, is the right starting habit: decide the jurisdiction, then the duty, then the content. In Cardiff, the jurisdiction brings the Standards with it.

Common questions