Canterbury City Council Case Study: Online Income Generation Ideas Lab
We live in a world where technology makes it easy to access any kind of information. We have access to all kinds of rich media and authoring tools in our pockets with mobile phones, yet it can still be hard to influence outcomes that affect us all.
Canterbury City Council’s marketing and consultation team wanted to run a creative online ideas forum to crowdsource suggestions from local people on how the council could raise new funds to offset the impact of government cuts.
THE CHALLENGE
In order to address the shortfall in the level of current local government funding, Canterbury City Council needed to find new ways to generate its own sustainable sources of income to achieve financial self sufficiency by 2020. They set up an Income Generation Working Group to set about learning from others and gathering suggestions from local residents, stakeholders, councillors and council staff on how to achieve this.
HOW STICKYWORLD HELPED
The council’s marketing team set up an online Income Generation Ideas Lab hosted on their Canterbury City Council Stickyworld portal. This created an opportunity for local people to understand the mission, get involved and share their ideas which was available 24/7 over a three week period.
The team created an interactive slideshow to present and explain to people the issue about funding, the council’s aims and their desire to be proactive and inclusive to find solutions. Using Stickyworld’s commenting features they then asked and encouraged people to leave ideas on a range of themes from parking and litter enforcement to transport, environment and planning.
People were able to respond by leaving text, photos, links to online resources to explain and illustrate their feedback. The Stickyworld platform made this really quick and easy to do.
RESULTS:
Canterbury City Council used Stickyworld to support a really creative ‘bottom-up’ and citizen- focused approach to solving a crucial budget issue facing local government.
By adopting such a transparent, open and inclusive approach for crowdsourcing ideas they were able to reach and encourage many people to get involved, achieving a great result from their online engagement. The Income Generation Ideas Lab helped them build a common understanding of the financial pressures faced by the council, and created a place for innovation and ideas to flourish.
| “We were delighted to get so many ideas and our use of Stickyworld helped us to engage with our residents in a modern and inclusive way.” Kathryn Hearnden, Marketing Manager, Canterbury City Council |
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