City of Vincent

Challenge

In 2016, the City of Vincent undertook an internal review of the wide range of facilities, parks, and other public spaces available for the community to connect through meetings, activities, programs, events, classes, and other services. The review identified that the facilities were being utilised at a 20% occupancy rate. The City identified a range of facility management and asset improvement strategies to address this situation, however, it was the inability for the community to easily find and book its spaces that emerged as the key constraint.

This review came up at a time when both the Council and the community made it clear they expected an improved customer experience when accessing the City’s services. This included the availability of easy-to-use and accurate online services.

Solution

In 2017, the City of Vincent was introduced to SpacetoCo and a potential match was realised between the problems the City was trying to solve and the solutions that SpacetoCo had created. The City’s existing booking software provided some administrative tools, but little in the way of improving the process for hirers. SpacetoCo had identified early on that hirers wanted to know the following things quickly:

• What will the space cost me to hire?
• How do I pay and can I pay now?
• Does the space have certain amenities I need?
• How long will it take to approve my booking?

The City recognised they needed to improve in all 5 areas.

A decision was made to implement SpacetoCo for all 17 bookable zones in Hyde Park. Three months later, the City rolled out its other reserves and Halls. SpacetoCo is now used to grow and manage over 70 City of Vincent spaces for casual, seasonal, and regular hire.

Hyde Park is an inner-city park in Perth, Western Australia. It is located in the northeast corner of the suburb of Perth, just north of the central business district. One of the most popular locations, Hyde Park Gazebo, can be booked for weddings, kids’ birthday parties, baby showers or just some shade to get away from the summer sun. Click here to view this space on SpacetoCo.com

Outcomes

As soon as the City moved to SpacetoCo, customer satisfaction and relations started improving. Gradually the bookings increased, and the system started to pay for itself. With more people out and about using spaces, community and local economy benefits were being achieved.

The City of Vincent has realised the following key outcomes since making the shift to SpacetoCo:

• An increase in bookings up to 31.7% year on year
• Heavily reduced admin time for processing bookings (upwards of 30mins per booking)
• A 100% success rate on the collection of funds from Regular Customers
• A dashboard designed and built around the needs of a booking officers daily tasks
• Automated workflows and fewer time-consuming, manual processes

A Theme of Co-Creation

Through communication and feedback, SpacetoCo and the City of Vincent have collaborated and co-created to re-imagine how local government facilities are shared and managed.

As part of the collaboration between the SpacetoCo and City of Vincent teams, there were some unique features that SpacetoCo developed in partnership with the City. These features have since been essential to other local government partners using the SpacetoCo platform:

• Collecting key data from hirers when booking a space. To solve this, SpacetoCo implemented the option of setting multiple yes/no questions in the checkout flow to enable faster decision-making and to improve risk mitigation for booking officers.
• Building a solution for the extra costs related to commercial hire and wedding functions. Building a solution for the extra costs related to commercial hire and wedding functions. SpacetoCo created and iterated on the concept of additional items to enable the right tier of pricing to be selected by hirers in the checkout process.
• Easing the administrative burden associated with edits and cancellations. SpacetoCo effectively removed the need to ever raise a credit note by implementing automated refunds or additional charges in the event of a booking changing or being cancelled.
• Redefining the accounts process for funds collected. SpacetoCo built the monthly account reconciliation flow to ensure accurate record-keeping and the removal of time-consuming admin.

Keeping innovation at the heart of our approach, SpacetoCo set out to solve these key issues for the City. It would ensure a positive customer experience for guests booking spaces, and an easy-to-use administrative tool for the City's booking officers.