• Marketing of (schools) e-admissions and e-planning under spotlight
• New information on ‘joined-upness’ of phone and web channels to be presented

A wealth on new information on the way councils are presenting and promoting their e-services, and the take up they are achieving, will be presented at a seminar from the Socitm Insight Website Take up Service to be held in Bristol on 27 November.

Delegates at the seminar will be presented with new information from a recent survey by Socitm Insight’s Better connected team on the way councils have been presenting facilities for online applications for school places in September 2007. Local authorities in England have been obliged to offer this facility online from this year, and the research looked at all council sites across England, Scotland and Wales to see how they were presenting and flagging the service on their websites. 

Performance by local education authorities on the take up of e-admissions for the September 2006 intake varied widely, with Hertfordshire County Council achieving as many as 64% of admissions online, with others achieving results in single figures. Results for this year will not be known until the admissions process in completed towards the end of the year.

Delegates will also get an update on the performance of local planning authorities in achieving online planning applications. Stuart Mockford, Deputy Director of the Planning Portal, will be presenting delegates with a review of progress on e-planning to date including the latest figures for online applications against the Planning Portal’s target 10% by December 2006, and 15% by March 2007.

In addition to these updates on take up performance, and what high-performing authorities doing to achieve it, seminar delegates will also see a presentation previewing the Socitm’s Insight’s new ‘Better answered’ study. This research has looked at the way that local authorities are handling incoming enquiries through the phone, which, as research has shown, remains the most popular method among citizens of contacting their council. One aspect that has been explored in the study, and which will be presented at the seminar, is efforts that councils are making to shift enquiries from the (relatively expensive) phone channel to the (relatively cheap) web channel where customers can self-service their enquiries. 

The seminar is being presented by Socitm Insight as part of its Website Take up service, which provides and exit poll for visitors to participating authorities’ websites, enabling the compilation of visitor statistics and profiles, as well as information about what prompted their visit, what they were looking for, and how satisfied they were with their visit.  Service subscribers are also able to benchmark the performance of their website in terms of and take up and satisfaction against other authorities in the group.

The service, which was launched in 2004, has experienced a sharp increase in interest in recent months, with 80 local authorities now participating. While the seminar on 27 November is organised for service subscribers, non-subscribers are welcome to attend. 

Take up Service subscribers can attend the seminar free of charge (maximum two places - additional places £75 each) Socitm Insight subscribers who do not subscribe to the Take up Service: £125; Others: £275.

Notes for Editors

The Socitm Insight website take-up service is run in association with Nielsen/NetRatings, a web analytics company with extensive experience of site measurement and qualitative and quantitative research for public sector organisations.

Subscribers receive:

• qualitative and quantitative information about visitors to their website(s)
• benchmarking of visitor information against that of other participating local authorities
• analysis of all the results from all participants by month and type of authority
• summary report of the key messages, lessons learnt and case studies
• free places at information sharing workshops with other subscribers