Randwick City Council – keeping in touch with residents by SMS
Posted on April 21, 2009 by by jr
ITWire are reporting that the Randwick City Council has just implemented a new information service that keeps its constituents up to date with SMS messages. The system is reportedly two way in that problems and issues can also be SMS’d back to the council.
The Randwick City Council’s Community SMS Service offers a rather simple but effective web interface and they appear well ahead of the ACT Government who have only just recently started to consolidate their information (a concept I was advocating over 7 years ago) into their new Community Noticeboard (which also appears in the Canberra Times every Saturday).
My major criticism with the ACT Government approach, (and I have already provided feedback to the relevant area as I encountered this problem on behalf of one of my clients), is that unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be highly coordinated with information still being competitively provided in a disjointed manner by separate departments and agencies in multiple locations. Examples: here, here & here. To solve the problem the ACT Government really does need to consider a whole of Government policy directive and consolidating this information in to an online, fully searchable, meta-tagged gazette format for the information to truly become useful and accessible.
8 Comments to “Randwick City Council – keeping in touch with residents by SMS”
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Baby steps, Jonathan. Baby steps
L
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Maybe the ACT government doesn’t have the money and/or knowledge to come up with something similar. Anyone knows?
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Using SMS to communicate with large numbers of customers is terribly efficient. Where I work, we’ve started sending out SMSes to people with overdue accounts or expired credit cards, and it’s removed from us a big task of contacting those customers all the time.
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I must say I don’t like mobile phones, except for use with friends and family. I am not using a mobile at the moment (but it is a bit tough!). Receiving bill reminders by sms = big fail for me. If this starts happening involuntarily on other platforms, I will probably stop using them!
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I find that because I do all my bill payments online, an SMS reminder is not normally very useful. When I get a text, I’m not generally near my computer, or in a position to be able to pay a bill. Getting an email reminder, however, means that it sits in my inbox staring at me. Thanks to gmail, bill reminder emails are flagged, so that when the time comes to pay the bills, all I have to is go through my inbox for the information. That is just one way of doing things though. Back in the day when I used to pay all the bills printed on dead trees by ringing up and giving them my credit card number, a text would have worked a treat. I’m sure people still do that … (don’t they?).
I would be interested to know how the SMS experiment goes Dermott. I suspect you may discover the effectiveness dropping off over time, but it might surprise me yet
L
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It works quite well actually.
And use of phrases like “big fail” scream “I am a teenager and have no ability to communicate adequately”.
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I don’t have a problem with getting an SMS because I didn’t pay a bill but getting an SMS from Telstra because they want me to use their products “that’s a whole different story”. I hate Telstra junk messages.
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thedude – agree with you there. Advertising is a completely different kettle of electrons.
L
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