South Tyneside Council wins Local e-government excellence: Take-up & usage growth award

58% cost savings and high & growing take-up of an e-enabled service through effective service delivery & marketing

GOSS client, South Tyneside Council has won the Local e-government excellence: Take-up & usage growth at The e-Government National Awards 2009. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, joined a high profile list of ministers and key public sector figures on hand at the e-Government National Awards, on the evening of 20th January at the City of London's Guildhall, to congratulate the winners and other highly commended entries.

Channel Shift

South Tyneside instigated a programme to shift traffic from the phone channel to the web channel.It achieved this by

• Re-designing the waste and recycling pages on their website to be more prominent and easier to use.
• Promoting the web address.
• Introduced a doorstep collection postcode lookup.
• Marketing the website via an email campaign.

Prior to October 2008, only a few hundred people used the website for information about waste and recycling. They are now several thousands using the specific pages.

• October 08 – 8% - 203 transactions
• Nov 08 – 67% - 2873 transactions

This has resulted in a significant reduction cost per transaction reduction.

• October 08 - £2.97
• November 08 - £1.25

A 58% saving!

Tough competition

From almost 450 entries, the expert judging panel managed to select 72 finalists across eleven categories, and then completed the even more difficult task of choosing the winners.

Hosted by the Government's Chief information Officer John Suffolk, the ceremony brought together the top performers in public sector technology implementation to celebrate the advances made over the last year in driving efficiency, green IT, collaborative working and improved interaction between businesses, citizens and the Government.

Addressing the ceremony via video link, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown praised the work of the assembled public sector technology teams. "We are living through exceptional times," he said. "And it's hugely heartening to see such outstanding strides being taken to make e-Government work more smoothly, meeting challenges head-on and coming up with creative solutions that not only make services more efficient, but increase their effectiveness also."