5 Highlights from 5 Years of the Local Digital Declaration
July marked the fifth anniversary of the Local Digital Declaration, an agreement that affirms our collective ambition for local public services improvement in an age where technology continuously shapes the way we live and work.
As an original co-publisher of the declaration, Adur & Worthing Councils had already developed a range of apps to deliver better, more efficient services to residents and visitors at that point. The past 5 years though has been a chance to align our work with the ambitions and commitments of the declaration.
It also personally marks my sixth anniversary working at the councils — a period that has helped shape my career, working with some inspirational people.
1. OpenCommunity Data Standards
Working alongside Devon County Council, Buckinghamshire County Council and design studio Snook, a funded discovery report was produced in 2019 showing the benefits of adopting a common standard for community services data. Additionally to understand what a ‘directory as a service’ could and should look like. The research showed how adopting a common data standard could result in substantial savings. Buckinghamshire Council took this forward into an alpha project.
In 2021, Adur & Worthing and Essex Councils partnered on a funded beta project with the goal of driving widespread adoption of the data standard. The outputs of the beta project included the Open Referral UK website.
2. Citizen Hub Platform
For several years we had been using an industry leading CRM platform, syncing the customer data and cases to our main low-code platform. To develop the CRM further and provide additional staff access was going to be a significant cost. As we had effectively just been using the product as a customer lookup, we took the decision to rebuild this ourselves. It simplified our architecture and reduced our data call— but crucially gave us much greater flexibility. Programmatically linking to the contact centre call handling system, we were able to log all customer interactions and get real time data insight. We worked with an internal service designer and an external UX designer to hone a great user centred interface for staff.
Going further we built a Business Hub, specifically for teams to manage business and commercial customers. To this we integrated a campaign or bulk contact capability for contacting businesses or residents en masse. This takes full advantage of GOV.UK Notify to send communications by email, text message or post. As part of this project we moved nearly all our online payments away from a big provider to GOV.UK Pay as well!
3. Our Coronavirus Response
Arguably the pandemic derailed some of our ambitions around the declaration. With a critical need to move at pace to support our residents and businesses, we didn’t always have the time to carry out full user research or large discovery pieces. However, the past experience we had gained from working around a set of principles and our low-code development platform, meant we could build new services within days or weeks when everyone was focused on a single goal.
We built services to distribute over £45m of various business support grants and nearly £10m of household energy rebates. We also built a new community support platform that helped connect volunteers with people needing help with shopping or just lending an ear to the isolated. Over 500 people signed up to support more than 2,000 people in the first month. There were a host of other services built during that time, including hospitality pavement licences, customer appointment bookings, waste popup site bookings and generally nudging more payments online.
4. New Council Website
From Summer 2019 we started work to significantly upgrade our website and provide easier access to online services. We partnered with local agency Fresh Egg for user research with some local customers.
We closely followed the ground breaking LocalGov Drupal collaborative project, although sadly timelines didn’t quite align for us at that time. It has been fantastic to see this grow and mature, it would clearly be the obvious choice for our next iteration.
Key drivers for us were making the site inclusive and accessible, providing user-friendly content and a direct route to our digital services. We achieved this by prioritising our budget in the following areas:
As of July 2023 our website was ranked #2 in the UK Local Gov site index by Sitemorse and #24 by Silktide. We’re still striving to improve and next will be WCAG 2.2.
5. Rapid Improvement Team
Having a senior leadership team that lives digital is fantastic and has helped us start 2023 with impact. We have formed a new multidisciplinary team called Rapid Improvement — building our service design and business analysis capability along with our in-house development team. The aim, to step into services and help them unblock process transformation quickly and to inject some innovation into change. Ultimately, if we can help our service teams work smarter, we can provide a better customer experience. I’ll talk in more depth about this work in a future post.
What’s Next?
I’ve just read Daveslist posing the question of the local digital declaration being too ambitious. It certainly is very ambitious but at least signatories are working towards the same goals. Maybe some more than others. While i’m extremely proud of the work the teams do here, I know we need to work more closely with other councils, share our learning and feed from theirs. Roll on the rest of the year for these changes.
