At this time of year, councils and other public authorities with responsibility for maintaining local green spaces tend to see an increase in reports from members of the public about overgrown grass.
In many, if not most cases, these reports draw attention to an area already included in a maintenance schedule. In other cases, it might be that reports about issues within a particular park or on a roadside verge are handled differently to others, whether that’s because of, for example, a “no mow” campaign or because the area is maintained by a third party.
Therefore, one of the best things authorities can do to reduce unnecessary contact is to communicate upfront about scheduled works to reassure would-be report-makers that you’re already aware and remove the need to submit a report.
FixMyStreet Pro, our street, highway and environment fault reporting service, lets authorities do this in a few different ways.
Displaying dates for scheduled works
Lincolnshire County Council makes use of an asset layer shared from its integrated system, Confirm, to highlight grass areas maintained by the Council and access the next scheduled maintenance date.
When a map pin is placed within a highlighted area by a report-maker, and the ‘grass cutting’ category is selected, a message is displayed to the user to communicate the next scheduled date for grass cutting, and the form asks the user if this answers their query.
Displaying a message to users
Another option is to take a more general approach, like Northumberland County Council, which displays a message to users to explain that its grass cutting season has started later than usual, so users may not need to make their report.
The message appears when a user has selected the ‘grass cutting’ category and dropped a map pin within a highlighted area (facilitated through integration with the Causeway One asset management system).
Similarly, Gloucester City Council shares a message with users to explain its approach to grass cutting, including some messaging that only appears in certain wards to indicate how grass cutting is handled differently within certain areas.
Meanwhile, Bromley Council uses FixMyStreet Pro’s messaging functionality to identify locations where grasses will not be cut as part of a campaign, and signposts to more information for users.
During periods of high demand, you may also want to share category-specific messaging on the homepage of your FixMyStreet Pro site, to share information with all visitors to the site.
Messages like this can be added and edited by council staff with the correct permissions from within the administration dashboard.
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While this blog post focuses on communicating about grass cutting schedules through FixMyStreet Pro, the same functionality can be used to communicate about schedules for other maintenance, such as for drains or bins.
If you’re an authority already using FixMyStreet Pro and would like some help communicating about maintenance schedules through your service, please open a ticket.
If you’re not yet using FixMyStreet Pro and you’d like to find out how it could work for you, get in touch.
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Image: Tom Van Dyck on Pexels