Blog posts about Advice

Once you’ve invested in FixMyStreet Pro, then of course you’ll want to ensure that your residents can find it easily. Here are a few ideas for making sure everyone knows where to make those street reports.

Full-site search and replace

It sounds pretty obvious, but if FixMyStreet Pro is replacing a previous service, make sure you search your entire site to check that all your links are pointing at the right place. It’s always surprising to find just how many forgotten pages can be found in this way, taking users to retired parts of your site, or dead links.

While you’re at it, are there any automated emails or printed materials that might still include out of date URLs?

A memorable URL

By default, we place FixMyStreet as a prefix to the council’s URL, like this: fixmystreet.eastherts.gov.uk.

If you prefer, we can go for something shorter, like Bromley did: fix.bromley.gov.uk.

Once you’ve got a nice memorable URL, it’s easier to put on leaflets, posters and in newsletters and emails.

Give a bit of space

Consider adding a link directly to your FixMyStreet Pro service on your website’s homepage, at least for a while until your users get to know where it is.

How about some promotion?

If you have a budget for marketing, you can see very good returns for a small investment on social media and search engine marketing.

You might like to run ads for a limited time on Facebook or Twitter, where just a few pounds can bring you both brand recognition and multiple click-throughs; or on Google Ads where you can bid on keywords such as ‘report potholes in [the name of your council]’.

If money is tight, see our recent post on low-cost ways to promote your FixMyStreet Pro service.

Or optimise for free

Your web editors are probably already au fait on how to optimise web pages to ensure they rank highly on search engines for relevant phrases. Make extra sure they’re putting their best SEO efforts into your report gateway page for maximum benefits all round.

But don’t worry too much

One nice thing about FixMyStreet is that users don’t have to come via the council website to make a report: if they go via the national FixMyStreet.com website or app, and their report is within your council boundaries, it’ll come to you anyway. It’ll also appear on the council’s FixMyStreet Pro installation.

That happens the other way round too, so the national site also displays reports made through your website. The upshot is, if your residents can remember FixMyStreet.com, they can make a report directly to you.

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Image: Sydney Rae (Unsplash)

When a resident makes a report on the national FixMyStreet site, we ask them to choose a category for the issue, and to place a pin in the map to show its exact location.

These two pieces of information inform where the report is sent. Each council can stipulate exactly which categories they would like displayed: commonly these will be Potholes, Street lights, Graffiti, and any other issue types they deal with. Many councils, and especially larger ones, assign each category to a different email address (or route within their CRM if they’ve opted for full integration with FixMyStreet).

As a FixMyStreet Pro client council, you’ll have the ability to edit categories via the dashboard: delete them if you no longer use them; change the title or email address if required, or add new ones — try it out for yourself on our demo site. Non-client councils, by the way, can get in touch with us at any time to ask us to do the same on their behalf, for the nationwide FixMyStreet.com site.

But there’s a little more that FixMyStreet does, too. As a council, you’ll be well aware that just because a report’s made within your boundaries, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s dealt with by you. In the two-tier UK council system, responsibility for different categories of report are often split between county and district councils, or borough councils and the GLA, for example.

FixMyStreet can effortlessly deal with this, based on which category has been assigned to each report. If it needs to be directed to a different council or body, you need never even see it — even if the report is originally made via your own website, it’ll still appear on the map for other residents to see, but it will be winging its way safely to the other authority.

Find out more about FixMyStreet Pro, and ask questions, at one of our regular Friday webinars.