Wollondilly Shire Council
June 29th, 2009
This month’s feature council is Wollondilly Shire…
How long have you been using Local-e?
Since early 2003.
What is your favourite feature?
I think the Community Directory facility is great and it allows the Community to enter their own events onto the What’s On Section. The fact that Council can approve these events also gives us the control and security that we need.
Community groups and services have the power to control the information that they provide to the community via the online Directory. By providing what is essentially a mini website, groups that would not normally have exposure on the internet now do.
The ability to now export the data from the Directory into an Excel spreadsheet has been invaluable in allowing Council to still provide a hardcopy Directory, in a format that is consistent with other Council documents, to residents who don’t have access to the internet.
What is your least favourite feature of Local-e?
Formatting in the Maintenance screens. We have a lot of trouble with the font and style changing during the approval process. Trying to get this formatting correct and looking good is a little time consuming.
How many staff at your Council use Local-e?
Approximately 200 staff can view our web site at the Council. 18 staff can make updates to the site.
How does your Council manage content publishing responsibilities?
We have meetings every two months to discuss any major changes to the site and we have people in each division of council who make updates to their sections.
Do you have a special tip or trick that you have found invaluable that you could share?
Yes, we actually have a list of tips that we have all contributed to. Our best tip is as follows: Anything that is copied from Word or selected from PDF, paste into Notepad in the Accessories section of Programs, then paste from Notepad into the web maintenance screen. This strips the formatting out of the text and it is less temperamental.
Does your community use the Community Directory?
Yes they do, many community events are entered onto our system by members of the community. We currently have approximately 200 groups and services listed in the Community Directory however this is only half what we had in hardcopy before going online. The requirement for services to put on and update their own data has been great from some groups but not for others. How to overcome this without having to provide a staff member to do ongoing individual data entry of updates is becoming a dilemma for us.
Community response to using the Directory has been good, although a learning curve. We still distribute approximately 1000 hardcopies each year.
Do you have a strategy for handling Community Directory?
We have one staff member from Council’s Community Services Team who approves the submissions. This staff member is also in charge of the Community Directory, she therefore has control over what information goes onto the site by community members.
How does your community engage with Local-e?
We have average daily hits of about 12000. We don’t get a lot of contact from the community via the web site, however we get phone calls generated by people accessing the site.
