Sitemorse

Overcoming challenges to help with digital transformation

Briefly describe the initiative/ project/ service

Rochdale Borough Council has partnered with Sitemorse to help deliver a more accessible and usable corporate website that will help contribute towards improving reputation, channel shift and making savings.

Why do you think it should win this award?

Sitemorse has been instrumental in helping us deliver a more accessible website, improve reputation and build confidence in our site. In 2015 we changed our website CMS to Sharepoint knowing the ‘out of the box’ solution was not accessible and not believed to be easy to make accessible.
We used Sitemorse’s automation tool that helps to improve the digital experience by identifying website errors. It also replaces sporadic and often manual assessment of inefficiency resulting in an improved customer experience of the website.
Sitemorse is the only recognised independent sector benchmark auditing service of UK council websites; the results are published through a Sitemorse INDEX.
After investing resources into using both Sitemorse as a product and their excellent, speedy and knowledge support service we were able to significantly improve our website and retain our 4-Socitm rating.
Sitemorse has always offered us excellent support, been very flexible in modifying our contract as our requirements change as well as acting upon suggestions to improve their product/service to meet our needs. During service deployment, we collaborated on a joint project to improve the overall score, through online workshops and regular support.

What are the key achievements?

The key achievements are displayed in tables – see attached. The biggest improvement by far was moving from position 372 in the Sitemorse INDEX to 16th place; 409 local authorities were surveyed.