Overview
Mansfield’s picturesque Shire is only 2 hours drive north of Melbourne. The combination of lifestyle and proximity to Melbourne has seen the permanent population grow from 6,631 in 2001 to 8,605 in 2016. The landscape is dominated by the Great Dividing Range and includes the alpine resorts of Mt. Buller and Mt. Stirling. Natural environment features within Mansfield Shire are the Alpine National Park and Australia’s second-largest inland waterway – Lake Eildon. With Mansfield Shire being a nationally recognised icon location, our municipality is in high demand for recreation and lifestyle activities.
The Challenge
Mansfield is one of the smaller rural council’s in Australia and as such it has limited resources and budget. However, new CEO Alex Green believes in the ability of seven the smallest councils to use open source and cloud technologies, and a shared environment to drive innovation and better service delivery within the resource constraints.
The community expect better service delivery, and increasingly want to access those services online. The challenge for Mansfield was to deliver services that are on a par with large metropolitan councils at a fraction of the cost.
The Solution
Sympony3 was engaged by Mansfield Shire Council to partner with The first piece of work was to develop a long-term strategy for the organisation. Symphony3 worked onsite with Mansfield staff to develop a vision and to undertake a gap analysis of where the business was at in terms of technology. A 3 digital roadmap was developed that outlined the steps required to attain the vision.
In early 2018 implementation of the digital platform was commenced. Within this timeframe, Mansfield launched their new website on the Symphony3 platform in late 2018. The response was overwhelmingly positive from the community and staff were energised and delighted that their community could engage with them on a simple easy to use and modern platform.
The Outcome
The new platform includes:
- A new modern, responsive website based on DTA best practices
- Integrated online forms including a customer request portal that integrates with the internal CRM and streamlines the service request process.
- Integrated online payments
- Email marketing capability directly integrated into the website
- A community consultation portal to improve community engagement
- A secure councillor portal where councillors can access important meeting documents
The community has embraced the website with large numbers of residents signing up to receive a login and to receive email newsletters. In addition, the digital transformation process has unlocked the potential of staff, with staff embracing new technologies and developing ideas and innovative new ideas to engage and service the community.
