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SocietyWorks in 2022

The last twelve months have been pivotal for SocietyWorks. We have delivered more solutions than ever to our growing public sector client base.

Let’s take a look at what SocietyWorks has been up to this year.

Introduction from our Managing Director

Angela Dixon

Angela Dixon

Managing Director

2022 has been a year characterised by unprecedented economic turbulence. New and complex economic issues are challenging the very fabric of our society. We are all feeling the impact on society’s critical infrastructure, and recognising the increasing challenge of ensuring that citizen services are fit to meet increasing demand. At SocietyWorks, we are aware of the pressures on our public sector clients, who are having to do more with less resources and funding, and we want to help.

In this annual review you will see new developments to our products and services that significantly improve the end to end workflow of our clients’ processes, making these more efficient and effective, as well as ultimately improving the user experience for the citizen. We are proud to be working collaboratively with our clients, solving problems together through intuitive, citizen-centred technology.

At SocietyWorks, we believe that challenging and complex problems can be solved if we work collaboratively and openly with our public sector clients and partners. We believe that experiences and learnings gained from working with our expansive list of local authority clients can be drawn upon to support solution development for other local authorities. We believe that we have the right skills and values-driven approach to enable our public sector clients to deliver effective citizen centric digital services, and that together we can demonstrate that society works.

Comments from our Chair

Mandy Merron

Mandy Merron

Chair

2022 has been a transformative year for SocietyWorks.

As the business has grown, we recognised the need to invest time in transforming our ways of working to ensure consistency and excellence in our approach to client partnerships. Collaboration has been key to this transformation. Working closely with our local authority clients has meant that we are able to better serve citizens through improved citizen experience and interaction with public sector services.

Our Board recognises that times are tough for our clients, with significant economic uncertainty. We remain focused and committed to developing and implementing cost effective digital solutions. We want to help and enable our clients to provide intuitive, elegant, user-centric digital services to citizens. We continue to remain dedicated to easing the administrative burden of our clients’ workflows.

It has been a privilege to step into the role of Chair and work collaboratively with a Board and staff team who all care deeply about making a positive impact on society through their work. In spite of the current economic climate, I truly believe that through ongoing collaboration with our clients and partners and listening to the needs of the communities we serve, we will increase our positive impact on society, better serving citizens through effective digital solutions.

What we did in 2022

Our impact

We envision a world where all citizens can access public sector services with ease through intuitive and simple to use digital solutions.

Our mission is to help our public sector clients better serve citizens through effective digital solutions.

633,000k+

Reports made via FixMyStreet, mySociety’s nationwide reporting service, and FixMyStreet Pro in 2022.

40%

Fewer avoidable customer contacts about waste services (WasteWorks for Bromley Council)*.

99.5%

Drop in duplicate reports (FixMyStreet Pro for Buckinghamshire Council).

19 years

Of experience helping citizens to interact with 30+ local authorities and public sector organisations.

An award-shortlisted partnership

We were delighted to make the shortlist for the Public/Private Partnership award at the LGC Awards 2022, in recognition of the work we completed with the London Borough of Bromley to develop WasteWorks, a new, self-service digital domestic, bulky and green waste service.

LGA award 2022 nomination

“We are incredibly proud of the partnership we have built with Bromley Council over the last ten years. Bromley’s dedicated team shares our desire to improve the accessibility and transparency of digital council services, and this is reflected in the scalable, user-centred solutions we produce together and their positive impact on residents and staff.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director

Understanding what citizens want

Back at the start of the year we published the first edition of our ‘Citizen reporting in the UK 2022’ report in collaboration with mySociety, and based on a YouGov survey.

Citizen reporting in the UK 2022

If you missed it, the report examined the current expectations UK citizens have of local government and public sector reporting services. Among our discoveries were:

  • 74% of respondents to our survey listed ‘improving the place where they live’ as a top motivation for making reports
  • Only 22% of respondents wanted a dedicated mobile app for making reports, with most wanting to use a website that’s optimised to work well on any device
  • According to the citizens we surveyed, the most useful feature a reporting service can have is the ability to route a report to the right authority, with no need for the user to know which one that is

Learn more about what citizens want from reporting services

Read the full report

Helping make applications easier

This year we started work on a new cloud-based product for local authorities: ApplyWorks.

From dropped kerbs and H-bar markings to trading licences, taxi licensing and skip hire ApplyWorks provides a user-friendly front-end workflow for taking online applications and payments.

Find out more

ApplyWorks wireframe for different screens

We’ve been solving council problems

Take a look at some of the solutions we’ve introduced for councils this year.

Automatically redirect reports to other bodies and enable them to update reports without integration

See how it works for Buckinghamshire Council, who automatically triage reports to parish and town councils, which they anticipate will create over £50,000 in savings for grass and hedge cutting reports alone**.

Remove friction and barriers to reporting issues with multiple bins

Let residents report problems with multiple bins at their address within the same workflow via WasteWorks.

Ensure residents have the most up to date information with out of hours messaging

Schedule out of hours messaging to manage expectations and divert emergencies. Take a look.

Improve efficiency by administering report assignments directly from FixMyStreet Pro

Improved admin tools allow managers to directly assign inspectors to particular reports from the dashboard.

Who we worked with

We’re proud to be trusted by 31 councils and other public sector bodies in the UK and abroad to deliver accessible, reliable and user needs-focused digital products and consultancy.

Bath and North East Somerset Council Bristol City Council Bromley Borough CouncilBexley Borough Council Lincolnshire County Council Buckinghamshire CouncilCheshire East Council Peterborough City Council Rutland County Council Hackney Council Oxfordshire County Council Shropshire Council City of Westminster Ringway National Highways Transport for London Central Bedfordshire Council Stadt Zurich North Northamptonshire Council West Northamptonshire Council Merton Council Hampshire County CouncilEast Sussex CouncilCamden CouncilKingston upon Thames CouncilSutton CouncilSutton Council

Lots happening in London

This year the boroughs of Brent, Camden and Southwark joined our FixMyStreet Pro community. Meanwhile, the Royal Borough of Kingston and the London Borough of Sutton adopted WasteWorks as their new front end waste service.

Peabody Housing Association

A new first for FixMyStreet Pro: the service was introduced in Thamesmead by the Peabody Housing Association to make it easier for residents to report local environmental issues.

New functionality for Buckinghamshire

A series of exciting improvements have been made to Buckinghamshire’s instance of FixMyStreet Pro this year, including the ability to automatically triage reports to parish and town councils.

Bulky goods in Peterborough

In progress: we’re working on a project for Peterborough City Council’s instance of WasteWorks to allow residents to request and pay for bulky goods collections through the portal.

“FixMyStreet Pro is an excellent example of how we can offer a modern and responsive environmental maintenance service to Thamesmead residents. It’s great to be launching it here, and I look forward to hearing resident feedback about it over the months ahead.”

John Lewis, Executive Director of Peabody

Events

We’ve enjoyed meeting with councillors, Chief Executives, clients and other partners at several events this year, including…

Local Government Association Annual Conference

Sally and Clare at the LGA conference

SDinGov

SDinGov and SocietyWorks Logo

User groups

Chris one of our senior developer moderating an user group session

Highways UK

Coffee with the FixMyStreet logo on the foam and the printed panflets we use during the event

New team members

It’s been great to welcome some new team members in 2022:

Amelia Nicholas

Amelia Nicholas

Bringing years of experience to the role of Head of Client Partnerships

Victoria Mihell-Hale

Victoria Mihell-Hale

Who joined our team of developers as Junior Developer

Nicolle Whitehead

Nicolle Whitehead

Helps to look after our clients as an Account Manager

Nik Gupta

Nik Gupta

Added to our talented development team as Developer

Meet the full team

New board members

We are also proud to announce the appointment of new members to our board of directors:

Mandy Merron

Became our new Chair, helping to ensure we make solid strategic and commercial decisions based on her more than 30 years’ experience helping businesses and not-for-profits to grow.

Francis Mainoo

Joined us as a non-executive director, bringing with him 20+ years’ experience in sales and marketing, and a real passion for community-strengthening technology.

Onyeka Onyekwelu

The newest member of our board, brings experience from working with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the London Office of Technology & Innovation (LOTI), and a commitment to closing data gaps for underrepresented groups.

See who sits on our board

What’s next?

More research

Keep your eyes peeled for some more research into citizen reporting trends, this time focused on users of the national FixMyStreet service. How do they make reports? Why do they make reports? What do they want from FixMyStreet in the future?

Digital Government 2023

We’ll be taking part in the Digital Government 2023 conference in London on 23 May 2023 – will we see you there?

Register your attendance

Helping housing associations

Following the work we’ve been doing with Peabody recently, we’ve been invited by Ad Esse to participate in a panel webinar about closing the feedback loop between residents and housing associations.

Want to join us? We’ll make sure you receive an invite.

Get in touch

Strengthening our community

From user groups to webinars and beyond, we’ll be facilitating plenty of opportunities for our community of council and public sector clients to share knowledge and influence the continuous development of our products.

Stay up to date in 2023

See our latest news

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Got a question?

Contact us for advice on how we can help you with citizen-centred products, service design and discovery.

Get in touch

Amelia Nicholas

More from mySociety

Find out how our parent charity mySociety has been repowering democracy this year in its annual review.

Read the mySociety annual review

* Within a few months of launching WasteWorks, Bromley Council saw a 40% drop in avoidable customer contact thanks to the system’s functionality

** Buckinghamshire’s instance of FixMyStreet Pro now automatically triages reports to its parish and town councils, enabling those councils to update reports even without access to a CRM. For grass and hedge cutting reports alone, the reduction in administration and progress chasing calls is anticipated to create savings of circa £50,000 per year.