Local Council Award Designs
To complement the NALC Local Government Awards Scheme: Foundation Award, Quality Award, Gold Quality Award
The Challenge
In 2013 the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) and the Society of Local Council Clerks (SLCC) set up the Improvement and Development Board to establish initives to improve the effectiveness with which local councils deliver improvements to the well being their communities. One of these initiatives is the The Local Council Award Scheme. This sets a standard and provides accreditation for councils meeting the standard. The standards framework sets out the activities, governance, community engagement, value for money and accountabilities of councils meeting one of three levels:
- Foundation Award
- Quality Award and
- Quality Gold Award
Achieving these standards requires clear governance, community leadership by the council, engagement with the community, performance reporting and accountability for good or poor performance leading to continuous improvement. Communities need to see objectives get set in the interests of the community, solutions and services implemented using local knowledge, the results of the implementation measured against objectives, value for money reviews and the assesment of positive outcomes for the community.
Providing openess, transparency and accountability in local government requires the structuring and publishing of large amounts of information in a way that can be easily and quickly understood whith clear and open mechanisms for feedback to local government regarding all aspect’s of performance. This needs to be balanced with the need for local government to carry out its duties and obligations without getting bogged down in dealing with information requests.
The large amount of information that this implies and the accessibility of the information to everyone in the community means that the information needs to be delivered and available electronically via a website which is designed to handle this information.
In addition a website needs to be:
- Resilient; which means that it needs to be protected from deliberate or accidental deletion or corruption.
- Compliant; with Government standards
- Supported; i.e. for system updates and user assistance.
The Solution
We have a website design approach to match the structure of the information required to underlie the activities and publishing requirements of the best practice implied by the Local Government Award Scheme. Depending on the Award level (Foundation, Quality or Quality Gold) there are increasing requirements for publishing information on the intentions, actions, results and evaluation of all council activities.
The complexity of the activities, governance, reporting, community engagement, efficiency reviews, standards, policies etc mean that there are many ways that a council can choose to structure information about its activities. We have a solution which we feel maximises the power of the website to inform, keeps the updating simple and not least, easily demonstrates to the Local Council Awards Scheme that the majority of the award criterion are being met. The high level sections relating to this approach are shown below and we can explain more detail to you at a meeting to discuss your requirements.
- About Us
- Our Mission and Vision
- Future Action Plans
- Councillors
- Liaison and Partnerships
- Community Engagement
- Parish Council Activities
- Parish Council Finance
- Parish Council Accounts
- Parish Council Transparency
- Parish Council Calendar
- Parish Council Meetings
- Parish Council Notices
- Annual Parish Meeting
- Social Activities
The Home page has an additional set of links that are often described as “Your area of interest” which provides visitors with quick links to regularly used pages and information that you want to give a high prominence.
You can simply publish information to meet regulatory requirements, from the Local Governments Acts to Transparency Codes, Freedom of Information Act, the Localism Act and much more. The website provides general explanatory context to the information to make it accessible to the general public so you don’t have to prepare all the content. In addition our websites are:
- a responsive i.e. designed for phones and tablets as well as laptops and desktops.
- automatically backed up to a secure data centre.
- compliant with government guidelines for local government websites.
- scalable, allowing your website to grow and cover additional topics and provide additional features as the council’s publishing ambitions grow.
- easy to update with notices, news and documents.
- easy to handover to a new clerk or administrator with step by step user guides.
- easy to add news, articles, images, photos and surveys, additional information pages much like creating new Word documents.
Once we have clarified your requirements we can add additional pages that are of community benefit such as lists of community organisations, services from the local authority and other public service providers.
We can supply stock images to add visual content but we prefer to use as many images as possible from your area to provide a familiar and distinctive visual theme.
Smart phones and tablets
Mobiles Overtake Desktops
Web browsing with a smart phone or tablet computer overtook the volume of web browsing by desktop and laptop computers in November 2016 according to Web analytics firm StatCounter. For website owners this means that it is essential that websites are designed for use on multiple devices
Multi-device display built in
