Open Digital Planning
In 2022, we worked with a group of councils and technologists to create the brand, website and communications strategy for a shared digital planning portal.
We ran workshops, crunched data, and worked our creative magic… and Open Digital Planning was born.
About Open Digital Planning
Open Digital Planning (ODP) is a community of council officers and digital experts from 28 local councils, digital agencies and central government.
They work together to design and build the next generation of local government planning services in England.
They use open-source software to improve access to planning data, allow information to move seamlessly and help automate routine processes.
The problem we wanted to solve
The group of councils had started collaborating on and sharing the same software and user interface. Their work aimed to make the whole process more efficient, reducing the amount of form filling and bureaucracy, making the process more user-focused and digitising the process that had formally been done with a hybrid paperwork / digital process.
The project offered council planning departments and council planning experts the opportunity to input into the design of the software and input their ideas. They wouldn’t be presented with the final product. Instead, they would have the opportunity to help shape it.
The collection of councils and technologists working on the project had a concept but no branding, website, communications strategy or onboarding process for those wanting to join the project.
They enlisted our help to drive these aspects of the project alongside the existing participants.
Our work with ODP was split into two phases:
- We first developed the concept to give the group a clear identity and attract more councils to collaborate. We then built a new website.
- We audited and updated the communications, onboarding process, and website in the second phase.
Phase 1: Branding, logo, and content strategy to attract prospective councils
The nascent group had the concept and products but no name or brand identity. That’s where we came in.
Initially, we referred to this project as “RIPA/BOPS” (an acronym), two of the products the group had collaborated on. However, everyone wanted to give the project a collective identity unrelated to the product names, so Open Digital Planning was coined.
We investigated existing approaches to content, marketing, and high-level web strategy and considered ways to encourage more council planning teams to participate.
We designed the logo, website, and content from scratch through an iterative process with the participating council planners. Much of this would focus on presenting the work done during their alpha phase to new councils to encourage participation.
The process
We began with a Theory of Change workshop to define the project's scope by working backwards from project goals. These included:
- Drive adoption of the products and services by councils
- Design an identity (visual and verbal) for the ODP Programme to build momentum and clarity
- Promote digital planning
- Demonstrate the benefits of collaborative, open-source projects within government
- Demonstrate the benefits of digital transformation
- Review of existing documentation to understand the process of creating RIPA/BOPS
- Audience typology and user needs workshops to view the project from the stakeholder side and explore user groups and their needs
- Agree on the scope of the project and likely outputs
We used the Google Ventures design sprint model over two sprints. This sprint model is an effective way of problem-solving and making decisions over a short span (5 days) to design and create prototypes that are ready to test. It encourages out of the box thinking and ideas generation.
Outcomes
A) Branding
- Logo and guidelines for usage
- Brand identity, including taglines
- Brand assets and templates with defined typography, colours and guidelines for use
B) Web content
- With a brand identity in place, we built a website which had to fulfil several key requirements in line with their web content strategy. This included:
- designing the information architecture
- editor guidelines
- content creation
- uploading and ongoing editing
- a content roadmap
We explored clean, minimalistic concepts as well as bold, colourful ones, aiming for a look and feel that captured ODP’s spirit of openness, and avoided a sanitised, corporate look. We also included small details in the brand and logo that were inspired by the software itself. It was a fun, creative, and collaborative process coming up with a new brand from scratch.
Phase 2: Review, benchmark and plan.
Once the brand was established, we worked with existing and new stakeholders to review Phase 1, agree on benchmarks for our channels and develop a plan (with roles and responsibilities) for the coming three months and beyond.
During Phase 1, we identified gaps in the comms work and wanted to help address this.
Phase 2 work had four main aspects
A) User research
We surveyed ODP users regarding internal and external comms. The results showed there was a need for an email newsletter, more control over the website and better onboarding,
B) communications strategy and planning
- Descriptions of ODP and its products and services, appropriate for different audiences and contexts. Along with clear descriptions of open source, digital transformation, and LA collaboration as they relate to the ODP programme.
- Guidelines for content creators (e.g. medium, audience, effect, content, tone, CTA)
- Strategy for external comms e.g. website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Notion, public meetings.
C) Comms asset evolution
We created a directory of reusable templates for various ODP channels that the team can tap into at any time. This included:
Variations of the logo
- Presentation, video and social media templates
- Generic banners
- Posters, roller banners and stickers
- An ODP image library and animated gifs
D) We also defined some new/additional aims for the comms work. These were to:
- Increase website traffic
- Position the project team as trusted local authority digital planning experts
- Increase the adoption of best practices in digital planning among local planning authorities in the UK
This would be done with:
- Blogs and case studies
- Service/ product /project demos
- Digital and social media
- Newsletters
- Events calendar
- Community updates and newsletters
- Website updates
We converted the website into a full CMS with assigned user roles so that the ODP comms team could edit the site directly.
There was also a content audit, with updates implemented as part of this project.
As a result, we added new sections and created content for new sections, e.g. partners, about us, news etc.
There was also much more focus on CTAs, namely “Register your interest”.
There were no restrictions. It was a very l open, collaborative process. We worked closely with all the partners on most aspects of the brief, from coming up with the colour palette to the fonts and designing what the services were, what they looked like and what they were called. It was very collaborative, and we got the project to a place where it was this clean new thing that hadn't existed before, and everybody was happy with what we had achieved.
Outcomes
The project now has a growing community of councils and technologists inputting into the platform and a clear process for those joining.
ODP gained a unique identity and brand to promote to potential stakeholders. ODP continues to use the brand, website, and processes established.
We introduced more councils to open source and collaborative ways of working, we’re hoping this can be translated into cost savings for the councils involved and continue the cultural shift within local government building on the work we've done with LocalGov Drupal.