Tell us once — Moving home
Written by Alex Mihai
We’ve all moved house at least once in our life. Not only is it stressful in terms of the actual move (making sure everything is packed, get a van to move everything, getting the keys, etc.) but there is also the long list of places your address needs changing.
So, in order to explore this problem and take advantage of new funding from the MHCLG, we submitted a Local Digital Funding bid for a discovery project in November 2018. How exciting!
The aim of our bid was to look at the challenges our residents face when reporting a change of address to their council.
The news came in December that our collective bid was successful. Yay!!
Our bid
Sunderland City Council led the bid with others, including North East Lincolnshire.
What we are trying to do is understand the problem and the impact it has on our residents and to develop a business case for a common digital approach to benefit residents and local authorities. We also want to understand this across a range of Local Authorities all sharing the findings of the research across all authorities in the spirit of collaboration.
Who we are working with
The collaborative includes Sunderland City Council as lead, Newcastle City Council, North East Lincolnshire Council, Watford Borough Council and Kirklees Council. Yay more friends!
We are seeing this as a great opportunity to share knowledge, skills across public sector and to deliver shared value from the outputs that many councils can use.
What we have we been up to?
We are so excited to start this project so we’ve had our first conference call as a collaborative with our new friends.
Because we’re all scattered all over the country, and to reduce our carbon footprint on the environment, we are using tools such as Slack, Trello and Google Docs to stay in touch and work simultaneously on this project.
We’ve agreed the ways we will work together, developed a draft vision statement, defined the in-scope services and produced an initial set of performance indicators that will measure success.
What’s next?
Sunderland City Council is recruiting the staff to conduct the user research and these will be in post very shortly.
The next task in the project will be collecting and analysing data. The User Researcher will soon be meeting residents from all of the collaborating authorities to gather their views and understand the range of services this affects and what the key issues are.
If you’re curious to find out what happens next, follow us on Twitter @SDNEL1 and hit the subscribe button on Medium.
