Blog posts about Feature focus

One of FixMyStreet Pro’s key features is its ability to enable councils to automatically keep residents informed on the status of their reports as they progress.

Status updates are important because, according to research we carried out with YouGov last year, receiving updates in response to a report is one of the most important things citizens expect from a reporting service. It’s also the thing that would most effectively stop them from chasing updates via other channels, which drives up the cost of reports for councils.

Templates for report status updates can be created and managed directly from the FixMyStreet Pro administration dashboard, or they can be pulled from an integrated case management system used by the council. Each time a report’s status is changed, an update will be sent to the report-maker and to anyone else subscribed to the report.

Common status updates relate to scenarios such as, but not limited to:

• Report received 
• Scheduled for inspection
• Not council responsibility
• Scheduled for repair
• Work underway
• Unable to fix – and why
• Re-opened
• Resolved

There is no limit to the number of templates you can create within FixMyStreet Pro, and they can be edited or deleted whenever necessary by staff, enabling you to quickly address any seasonal or situational changes.

So that’s what status updates are, but what makes a good one?

Best practice for report status updates

Be transparent 

For updates to be effective in reducing avoidable follow-up contact and failure demand, they need to accurately reflect what’s happening with the report. That means as well as explaining what you are going to do about a problem, you also need to explain if you are not able to do anything and why that is. 

Honest and open updates help you to educate residents on your intervention criteria, manage expectations during periods of high demand and discourage despondency and disengagement even if a problem cannot be fixed. 

Make it relevant 

Tailor your updates to the different types of problems residents are able to report to you so that they know what to expect once a report has been submitted. It helps to outline the timeframe within which you will respond to different problems, or explain why a particular problem may be higher or lower on your priority list.

Use accessible language

Take care to ensure your updates are understandable to everyone who may receive them. Avoid using technical jargon that only makes sense to members of staff, or codes from your integrated systems that won’t mean anything to residents. 

Additionally, consider using the local words for things where appropriate to apply an extra level of accessibility to the language within your updates. 

Signpost to more information

While it’s good to provide detail in your updates, it’s also important to keep them concise. Put the essential information in the update and include a link to another web page or document where the recipient can find more information if they want to.

Signposting can also be used to direct residents to emergency contact details, additional services and even customer satisfaction surveys.

Don’t create a dead end

If the update you provide is to inform the report-maker that the issue is not your responsibility, try to provide information on who is responsible, or assistance on where they might be able to find this out for themselves. This will help to reduce the likelihood of the report-maker getting back in touch. 

Acknowledge the value of the report

Finally, don’t forget to thank the resident for their report. Research shows that the main reason why residents report problems is because they want to improve the place where they live. Acknowledging this in your responses helps to improve the experience for residents and encourages continued commitment to helping you care for your area. This is particularly important in instances where the problem cannot be fixed. 

Additional advice

Alongside transparent status updates sent to residents after they have made a report, FixMyStreet Pro equips councils with a few useful ways to manage expectations beforehand, too. 

One of these is its site-wide messaging functionality, which displays a message from the council to report-makers in multiple places to inform them of, for example, expected delays in responses due to increased seasonal demand. 

Councils can also schedule these messages to display only during certain times, such as out of hours or during bank holidays.

Another way FixMyStreet Pro helps with this is by enabling councils to assign in-category messages which display during the report workflow. These can be used in a number of ways, such as to help educate on intervention criteria to ensure the report can be actioned or divert emergencies. 

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For more information about FixMyStreet Pro and its features, get in touch with us.

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Image: Reuben Juarez

FixMyStreet Pro has a very clever feature that suggests existing nearby reports to users if a pin is dropped on a map within a certain radius of another report of the same category. 

If an issue has already been reported, FixMyStreet Pro encourages the user to subscribe to the existing report instead of re-reporting it – a time saver for both the would-be report-maker and the council responsible for responding to the problem at hand.

Previously, the radius for this feature was fixed at 250 metres. However, at the request of our clients, we have now implemented a new update to enable FixMyStreet Pro customers to customise the radius within which an existing report will be suggested to a user.

A larger radius can be useful for reports about issues that are likely to cover a large area, where users may drop a pin in a number of places to report the same issue. Meanwhile, a smaller radius can be more helpful in areas where there may be lots of reports of similar, but not identical problems.

By encouraging users to subscribe to existing reports wherever possible, the duplicate report suggestion feature helps to increase transparency and facilitates a one-report-per-issue approach to problem reporting without creating any extra work for council staff. 

The duplicate report suggestion feature is available to all FixMyStreet Pro customers.

For more information about this feature, or any of FixMyStreet Pro’s other intuitive features, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. 

Mobile users of FixMyStreet and individual branded versions of FixMyStreet Pro can now make reports using a new crosshairs feature.

The crosshairs should make it even easier for report-makers to position the pin accurately on the map when using touchscreens, particularly those on smaller mobile devices. 

Here’s an example of how the new crosshairs look within the FixMyStreet reporting workflow, starting with finding the location of the issue you want to report on the map (the crosshairs will automatically display in your location if you select “Use my current location”), placing the pin and then repositioning if needed. Report-makers can pan and zoom in/out of the map as required.

And here’s how the crosshairs look on one of our cobrand FixMyStreet Pro sites (we have used Oxfordshire County Council’s version of FixMyStreet Pro as an example).

The crosshairs have been automatically added to all FixMyStreet Pro sites. 

If you are a FixMyStreet Pro client with a question about the crosshairs, please raise a ticket via the helpdesk.

If you are a council or other public body interested in learning more about FixMyStreet Pro, you can get in touch with us here.

FixMyStreet Pro equips councils with several features designed to help improve the reporting experience for residents by closing the feedback loop. 

One of the most significant of these features is its response template functionality, which enables council staff with the appropriate permissions to create and edit pre-written responses to be sent to report-makers according to the status of the report. 

Why response templates are important

According to research we carried out with YouGov last year, receiving updates in response to a report is one of the most important things citizens expect from a reporting service. It’s also the thing that would most effectively stop them from chasing updates via other channels, which drives up the cost of reports for councils.

By setting up response templates, you can easily provide detailed information to report-makers to help manage their expectations and avoid failure demand, without needing to manually write up a response for each and every report.

Plus, because all FixMyStreet Pro reports are displayed publicly on the map, the response will be shared with any other interested residents, which helps to deter duplication. It is possible for a slightly different response to be shared with the report-maker than the one displayed to the public (more on that below).

Common template responses deal with statuses such as: Report received; Scheduled for inspection; Not council responsibility; Scheduled for repair; Work underway; Unable to fix; Re-opened; and Resolved.

Automated and manual response templates

Different response templates can be created by you and applied to different categories, so that you can tailor the information provided to the problem at hand. 

This can either be done manually by staff – you choose from a drop-down menu, and if any template(s) is assigned to a state, those will be the ones shown when the update changes the state of the report.

Alternatively, templates can be automatically assigned via integration with backend systems or Open311. This means that when FixMyStreet Pro pulls a state-changing update from your system(s), and there is a matching template set up within the integration, then that template will automatically be applied. 

How to create a response template with FixMyStreet Pro

Within the FixMyStreet Pro administration dashboard, users marked as ‘staff’ who have been assigned permissions to ‘Add/edit response templates’ can access the ‘Templates’ manager.

From here, you can input a title and some text for your template, then set which categories and states it should apply to. You may create different templates for each category/state, or use the same templates across multiple categories.

As mentioned above, it is possible to create two responses for each template: one to be emailed directly to the report-maker, and one to be displayed publicly on the map. This is useful for sharing any extra information that you may not want to display publicly, such as feedback surveys.

There is no limit to the number of template responses you can create, and templates can be edited or deleted whenever necessary by staff, enabling you to quickly address any seasonal or situational changes.

If you have an Open311 connection, you can click ‘auto-response’ so that a template will be applied when the state is updated by the automated Open311 process. In this instance, if your Open311 server returns extra text as part of the update, you may put the placeholder {{description}} in the template here, and that placeholder will be replaced by the text from the Open311 server.

If you don’t have an Open311 connection, or your Open311 connection does not provide an immediate initial update, there is a special case where if a template is assigned to the Open state, and marked as ‘auto-response’, then it will automatically be added as a first update to any new report created that matches the template (ie. in the relevant category if assigned). This lets you give e.g. estimated timescales or other useful information up front.

By entering text in the ‘Text for email alert field’, the template text will update the report on the website and the email text will be sent to the user if they have opted into alerts.

Best practice 

When creating templates, you should consider:

• What are the most common response types that you send back to report-makers? It may be worth examining recent responses to find out.
• How should you word your response template text to make it as easy as possible for the report maker to understand the status of their issue?
• What title should you give the template so that it can be easily identified from a drop-down list when it is being applied by staff users?
• Consider whether you want to include a footer with any additional information (such as customer services information, or your website)

While this functionality can be a time-saver, we advise using it with caution to ensure that the template text is applicable to every situation in which it will be automatically applied. For example, we would recommend not assigning a ‘Resolved’ template to the ‘Unable to fix’ state, because this can cause confusion for residents due to the word ‘resolved’ implying that the issue is fixed. 

For more information on how to use FixMyStreet Pro’s response templates, including how to use HTML tags in templates, please read the Pro Manual. 

Got any questions, feel free to get in touch.

At SocietyWorks we always design our websites as ‘mobile first’, meaning that they work well on any size of device, automatically resize to fit any screen dimension and facilitate a simple, touch-friendly workflow for completing forms.

But did you know that FixMyStreet Pro, our street, highway and environment fault reporting service, is also a progressive web app (PWA)? 

Loosely speaking, this means that each of our clients’ FixMyStreet Pro sites has been designed with ‘app like’ qualities. They look and act like an app and they can be downloaded to a mobile’s home screen like an app.

How do PWAs benefit you?

According to some research we carried out earlier this year, only 22% of citizens want to use an app they have to download to make reports to their local authority,  while 43% would simply prefer to use a website that works well on mobile devices.

However, we know that some of our public sector clients like to be able to offer citizens an app to download to access their services, in addition to a mobile-friendly website.

PWAs provide the ideal solution. Unlike a dedicated app, PWAs give citizens the ability to choose how they want to use the service – whether that’s like a website or like an app –  with no obligation either way. 

They also enable you to provide exactly the same experience to citizens whichever way they are using the service, with new features and functionality automatically available. Conversely, a dedicated app may require updates to be downloaded after the initial installation, and if auto-updates aren’t available, the app won’t work to its maximum potential.

Another handy thing about PWAs is that they permit the addition of offline capability to your website, by downloading a bit of JavaScript (called a service worker) to your device. If you can’t connect to the website then it falls back to the service worker, which can also save reports when you have no connection and then upload them when you do. 

How to save a PWA as an app

To use FixMyStreet Pro as an app, simply load your cobrand site from your mobile’s browser, and from your settings select “Add to home screen”.

A shortcut to the PWA will then appear in the same way that an app does, except when you click it, a new browser tab will open instead of a dedicated app. 

Here’s a step-by-step example of how it works for Buckinghamshire Council’s version of FixMyStreet Pro. 

1. Load the website on your mobile browser
2. Hit the save/share button
3. Select ‘add to home screen’
4. Select ‘ok’/’add’
5. Use FixMyStreet as if it’s an app!

The PWA’s design makes it feel like you’re using a ‘normal’ app, with its mobile-friendly features, but you’re benefiting from using a web-based service that doesn’t require you to keep updating it. 

As you can see, the icon for the ‘app’ can be branded to use your own logo.

Please note: if no logo is supplied for the PWA icon, the FixMyStreet logo will be used by default.

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Please speak to your account manager for more information about the PWA version of your FixMyStreet Pro instance. 

Or if you’re not yet using FixMyStreet Pro but you’d like to know more, please get in touch.

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Image: Lucas Hoang

Recently we’ve been working with Buckinghamshire Council on introducing some new functionality to FixMyStreet Pro, our integrated street, highway and environment reporting service, to enable automatic triaging of reports to town and parish councils, and better ways of passing reports between authorities.

Parish and town councils

Parish and town councils cover almost the entirety of England and Wales, except for the main urban areas. There are 10,000 parish or town councils in England (National Association for Local Councils), and over 730 town and community councils in Wales (Welsh Local Government Association).

These councils take responsibility for a variety of things within the community, such as bridleways, bus shelters and litter bins, and they sit within larger principal authorities which may also sometimes be responsible for the same things in certain cases.

For this reason, when there’s a problem that needs reporting, it can be hard for citizens to know which level of authority is responsible for what problem and when.

New functionality for FixMyStreet Pro

FixMyStreet has always been able to automatically divert fault reports to other councils and authorities, based on the location and category of the report – but not at the parish level. Until now.

With the new functionality in place, parish and town councils can be set up as sub-bodies to a principal council within its instance of FixMyStreet Pro, and on the national FixMyStreet site. 

This way, categories can be assigned to more than one body, and asset layers can be placed over the map to enable the service to work out for the report-maker whether the report needs to go to the principal authority or the parish level council.

Case study: Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire Council is a unitary authority, but the county itself is made up entirely of parish and town councils. Residents can report numerous issues via Buckinghamshire’s FixMyStreet Pro site, some of which are the responsibility of the unitary council, others the responsibility of the parishes.

Previously, Buckinghamshire staff were forwarding reports to individual parish councils wherever necessary, but this wasn’t ideal, so they asked us to make it possible for FixMyStreet Pro to work out for the resident where the report needs to go, and to send it there without the need for any manual intervention. 

For example, any reports of fly posting are now diverted straight to the correct parish, based on the geo location information provided within the report.

In more complex cases, such as grass cutting, the recipient of these reports depends on the speed limit of the road. So, at one end of the road a grass cutting report might need to go to the parish, but at the other end of the road the report needs to go to the unitary council. 

Thankfully, the report-maker never needs to worry about this, because Buckinghamshire’s FixMyStreet Pro uses a speed limit asset layer, in addition to the geo-location and category, to work out where to send the report.

Additionally, from Buckinghamshire’s FixMyStreet Pro site, you can now view each individual parish or town council on its own map, along with the reports it has received. 

Wider benefits to councils

While Buckinghamshire and its parishes were the focus when building this new functionality, a few of the features we introduced are beneficial to all users of FixMyStreet Pro.

Updating report statuses via email

Arguably the most important one of these features is the ability to provide updates on reports without integration into a backend system. 

As you can imagine, most small parish or town councils don’t have expensive backend systems from which to manage inbound reports. In the past, whenever there’s been no backend system with which to integrate FixMyStreet Pro to facilitate a two-way flow of data, the only option would have been to email the reports.

In the spirit of keeping the feedback loop closed and being able to publicly display a report’s status (eg ‘fixed’ or ‘in progress’) on the site, we’ve made it possible for parish councils to update reports via email using a special code in the subject line, which will correspond to the new status of the report.

Of course, lots of councils or other authorities receiving reports from FixMyStreet may not have a backend system, so this feature is a really positive step forward in ensuring that feedback can always be provided transparently via the platform.

Private text updates

Another feature that will be of use to more than just parish and town councils and their principal authorities is the ability to specify different text to be displayed on the public report update and the private update sent directly to the report-maker. 

This is useful for sharing any extra information that you may not want to display publicly, such as feedback surveys.

Recategorising reports

Finally, Buckinghamshire wanted to be able to recategorise reports, because citizens sometimes select the wrong category. This could lead to reports being sent to a parish council when they should go to the unitary council, or vice versa. 

Now, council staff have the option to reassign a category if needed, which will ensure the report gets to the right place in the end.

For more information about FixMyStreet Pro, you can contact us here.

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Image: Beth Jnr on Unsplash

Evenings and weekends, bank holidays or special occasions – there are lots of times when councils and other local government bodies using our street and highway fault reporting service FixMyStreet Pro need to communicate out of hours information with citizens. 

On such occasions, it’s important that this information is shared with them before a report is made, to manage expectations, divert emergencies and reduce the likelihood of failure demand.

Happily, doing exactly that just got a lot easier, thanks to a new feature of FixMyStreet Pro, which enables staff to schedule out of hours messages in advance.

Easily share out of hours information

This new feature builds upon some existing functionality, which, until now, enabled a message to be hardcoded onto the homepage of FixMyStreet Pro sites, to be displayed at all times, most commonly used for communicating emergency contact numbers.

Now, not only can messages can be easily set up from the FixMyStreet Pro dashboard for both the homepage and reporting pages, a separate message can also be scheduled to display during pre-selected out of hours time periods, to explain, for example, how reports will be handled during this time, when to expect a reply and where to go if the issue is an emergency.

This is especially beneficial to councils and other agencies that have different procedures for handling emergencies within and outside of working hours – procedures which citizens cannot be expected to know off by heart.

For example, your out of hours emergency phone number might be different from the one you want citizens to use during normal working hours.

Setting up messages

Messages for both the homepage and reporting pages can be set up by your staff within the admin dashboard of FixMyStreet Pro, with the option to write a different message for each page if required. 

During scheduled out of hours time periods, the out of hours message will be displayed to report-makers. At all other times, the normal message will be displayed. 

If you only require messaging to be displayed during out of hours, then only the out of hours text box needs to be filled in and a time period selected. Equally, if no messaging is required, then both can be left blank.

There’s no limit to how many time periods can be scheduled, and schedules can be edited or removed easily whenever necessary.

Thinking outside the box

As with most of FixMyStreet Pro’s features, the out of hours message scheduler originated as a great idea suggested by a council using the service. 

Although it was originally intended for sharing emergency procedures and out of hours information, the message function can also be used for other purposes.

For example, Bromley Council uses it to advertise its green garden waste service.

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To find out more about FixMyStreet Pro, why not request a short demo with the SocietyWorks team?

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Image: Frank Busch on Unsplash

Litter is one of many local issues that can be reported using FixMyStreet, mySociety’s nationwide, map-based street reporting service. 

Each report received by FixMyStreet is sent to the council or authority responsible for dealing with the problem, which is established by the selected category and geo-location information within the report.

Reporting issues on England’s highways

Should a report be made about an issue on one of England’s highways, FixMyStreet knows to send it to National Highways instead of the local council, thanks to integration with the highways agency. 

National Highways also offers its own branded version of FixMyStreet Pro, enabling citizens to make reports directly to the agency using the platform’s intelligent functionality. 

Because all Pro sites are connected to the main FixMyStreet platform, wherever a report is made, they all end up in the same place, and the map will be able to display all existing reports to report-makers to help reduce duplication and improve transparency.

Not our problem

National Highways manages a vast stretch of motorways and some A roads, but not all problems found on those roads are its responsibility. Depending on the type of road, some issues, like litter, actually fall to the local council to take care of.

It would be unreasonable to expect citizens to know who is and isn’t responsible for different issues on different roads, which is where FixMyStreet’s ability to create an asset layer-based connected network for reporting  problems really shines. 

As mentioned above, the national FixMyStreet site automatically sends reports to the correct place based on the category and location of the problem. So if a citizen uses FixMyStreet to report litter on a road managed by National Highways but on which the council would be responsible for litter, the service will work this out behind the scenes and ensure the report goes to the correct place.

If a citizen goes to National Highways’ own FixMyStreet Pro site to make a report about litter on a road where the council is responsible, when the pin is dropped on the map and the ‘litter’ category is selected, a message will appear explaining that National Highways is not responsible. 

From here, the report-maker is encouraged to continue onto the nationwide FixMyStreet site, where the details of the report will be carried over, the remaining information can be filled in and the report can be submitted to the correct council.

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FixMyStreet was built to make it easier for citizens to report any local problem, without needing to know who is responsible. FixMyStreet Pro gives councils and other public authorities the opportunity to adopt the service as their own – hosted and managed by us. 

To find out more about FixMyStreet or FixMyStreet Pro, request a demo. 

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Image: Wilhelm Gunkel

When it comes to reporting problems with domestic waste bins, citizens tend to wait until there’s a problem with more than one of their bins to take action. 

Usually, this requires the creation of a separate report for each problem or bin. So if you have a problem with the lid of your domestic black bin and an issue with the wheels on your green garden waste bin, you would have to make two different reports.

As well as being time consuming for citizens, this also creates more work for council waste teams, who need to process multiple reports and organise separate resolutions all for the same address.

This cumbersome process is one of many user experience pain points that we wanted to address when we designed our domestic, green and bulky waste portal WasteWorks.

WasteWorks has the functionality to enable councils to let residents report problems with multiple bins at their address within the same workflow. 

Here’s an example of how it works for Peterborough City Council.

All problems for all affected bins are neatly packaged into one report, which automatically enters Peterborough’s in-cab system Bartec via direct integration, meaning no manual intervention from staff and no duplication of effort for frontline waste teams. From the single report, different reference numbers will be provided from Bartec back to the resident to help with tracking the progress from report to resolution for each issue.  

It’s a simple but significant feature that counts toward the many ways in which WasteWorks helps to make it easier for citizens to access domestic waste services online, while also creating a more efficient, streamlined process for council staff.

WasteWorks customers don’t have to allow the reporting of multiple bins at once; this is an optional feature that is dependant on the type of in-cab system you use and the configuration of your reporting processes.

Want to find out more about WasteWorks and how it could work for you? Request a short demo with the SocietyWorks team.

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Image: Pawel Czerwinski

For councils that don’t have an existing case management system, FixMyStreet Pro’s inspector tool allows staff to receive, manage and respond to reports directly from the front-end of the service.

The inspector tool works by enabling council staff to build up a shortlist of reports that they’re responsible for dealing with. It’s a neat little feature – and it just got even more useful.

Up until recently, reports had to be found and self-assigned by the individual staff members who would be taking ownership of them. 

Now, after working with our clients Cheshire East Council, we have developed the functionality to allow managers to directly assign inspectors to particular reports on their behalf.

This means that, when logged in to the front-end of FixMyStreet Pro, managers can view who’s been assigned to each report, and can assign or reassign reports to individual team members. 

Managers can also filter by report status to see how reports are progressing, and can bulk assign or reassign reports as needed.

For inspectors, the tool’s new feature means less time assigning themselves to reports and more time carrying out their inspections. Plus, because FixMyStreet Pro provides offline support, reports can be updated on-the-go, even without connection to the internet.

For councils like Cheshire East, the inspector tool replaces legacy pen and paper systems, improving the way reports are assigned and managed without the need to integrate with an external case management system.

The inspector tool has been made available to all FixMyStreet Pro customers.

Got any questions? Let us know.