How Walsall Council Delivers Improved Resident Experiences Through Multilingual AI Videos in Over 50 Languages

We interviewed Rebecca Jenkins, Customer Change Agent, and Kirstin Smith, Customer Delivery Manager (Innovation) at Walsall Council. They shared how the council is using Synthesia to drive a borough-wide transformation in public communication, making services more accessible, inclusive, and efficient.

Industry Context

Local governments are under pressure to modernise communication as demographics shift, service demand rises, and budgets shrink. Traditional formats like leaflets, PDFs, and outsourced video are too slow, costly, and inaccessible to meet today’s expectations.

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The Challenge

Kirstin and Rebecca lead Walsall’s customer innovation efforts, where they support both internal teams and resident-facing services with digital transformation. But despite their drive to improve public-facing content, they faced several hurdles:

• Inaccessible formats left some residents behind, particularly those with limited English proficiency, visual impairments, or low literacy.
• Inconsistent branding and messaging across departments created confusion and diluted trust between residents and the council.
• Traditional video production methods were costly. 

“Before Synthesia, producing video content was slow, expensive, and out of date the moment it launched. Now video is our default communication channel because it's agile and drives better engagement and understanding across our community.” – Rebecca Jenkins, Customer Change Agent

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The Solution

Walsall Council adopted Synthesia to create engaging, multilingual video content at speed. They began with a trial and quickly expanded use across departments after seeing immediate benefits. Synthesia’s AI avatars, automated translation, and built-in accessibility features enabled them to:

• Produce videos that are accessible in all languages — create the video once, and translate it into 52 languages in a matter of clicks.
• Built in moderation and sign-off workflows, easing concerns from IT around security and compliance.
• Localise videos with custom avatars of real staff to increase relatability and trust.

“As a government organisation, having moderation controls and dual governance built in was essential. It’s what allowed us to get buy-in across departments and move quickly.” – Kirstin Smith, Customer Delivery Manager (Innovation) 

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The Results

The success of Walsall’s rollout was made possible by:

• Multilingual Translation at Scale: 52-language output per video to serve a highly diverse community.
• Accessibility & Compliance Tools: WCAG-compliant templates, moderation features, and behavioural science-informed scripting.
• Custom Avatars: Real local staff were recorded to humanise content and improve engagement.
• Agile Production: Templates, internal upskilling, and strategic content guidelines enabled a small team to produce high-impact content at scale.

The results? 

• 3.5x Faster Production: What once took at least a week can now be done in 2 days. This allows rapid response to service changes, crises, and new initiatives.
  
  • Multilingual Reach: Every video is automatically localised into 52 languages—supporting both current and emerging resident demographics. This helps ensure that no one is left behind, even in one of the UK’s most deprived boroughs.
• Culture Shift: Synthesia empowered even non-technical staff to create video content. Training, internal comms, and consultations are now regularly video-led, increasing reach and engagement.‍
• Channel Shift Tracking: Walsall is actively measuring how Synthesia videos reduce email and phone queries by making services easier to access online.

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