As an organisation one of our top priorities is to be digital council in a digital place.
We pride ourselves on being both a good employer and a supporter of local businesses – and with our local discount scheme we’re able to do both.
And thanks to digital, we have found a very easy way of making this scheme a success.
Our Digital Business Partner, Pete Bartlett, explains more…
Dorset Council provides a range of employee benefits to our workforce. Since forming as a unitary authority in 2019 we surveyed our employees to find out what benefits they most liked and what they wanted more of. The biggest thing they missed from predecessor authorities was a local discount scheme, where you could identify yourself as an employee and receive an immediate saving from a local business.
When we investigated this, none of the previous information about the scheme had carried over into Dorset Council. There was no process and there was no handy list of businesses that used to offer employees a discount – and we had no one who had been managing previous schemes.
Therefore, we had to start from scratch!
In 2021 we approached a few businesses that our staff could remember used to offer discounts and, thankfully, they were very interested in joining a new scheme. We knew there was potential for this to work from businesses and demand for it from employees.
It’s important to bear in mind that when we were doing this investigative work we were just coming out of lockdown during the pandemic. The impact on the high street and local business had been significant and Dorset Council employees were changing how they worked and traditionally shopped and spent within our towns.
We worked with representatives of Dorset’s business community to develop a scheme that would highlight what they could offer to our 4600+ employees and in turn help drive economic activity towards them.
Since we were starting from scratch, we wanted to ensure we had as efficient a process as possible – for our employee and for the businesses joining the scheme.
We knew the audience for this was our staff so we explored using the Microsoft 365 tools to develop a slick process.
And although we didn’t have ownership of the process yet, we continued with the knowledge that resource requirements could be addressed if we designed a process that worked really well.
We started by co-producing an online form with representatives of the business community and employees. We wanted to make sure we captured not just enough information but also the right information, that would enable our staff to use the discounts that businesses provided,
Another key to making this a success was not asking too much as we didn’t want to make the process of joining the discount scheme a barrier.
We ended up with a simple form that captured information about the person submitting it, the type of business offering the discount, and the discount itself. The average time to complete the form was just under 5 minutes.
Then we created an online platform for all the responses to go into and then, using an automation tool called Power Automate, we were able to pull all the submissions through.
This first list is visible to the administrators only and the only manual part of the process was the approval process. We felt we needed ‘eyes on’ the content being submitted to ensure nothing untoward or dubious was automatically passed through.
Once approved the content moves to a second online platform that all our staff can access.
As the number of businesses and employees joining the scheme grew, we realised the list was becoming tricky to navigate.
To solve this, we worked with our internal Performance and Business Intelligence team and added an interactive map to the platform (using Microsoft’s Power BI tool). This map is auto populated from the postcodes of the business members and allows people to click on an area close to them.
The average time to administer each submission to the scheme is less than five minutes, which allowed us to secure the resources needed to maintain the scheme and formally launch it in September 2022.
Since launching, we now have nearly 100 different discounts available and this is growing all the time.
And the feedback we’ve had from both employees and businesses is really positive.
We will continue to tweak and improve the scheme based on feedback we receive from businesses and staff. For our business members, we have a built-in feedback form on approval, and once a year have an automated check-in with them as well.
Local business can join the scheme now by filling in the short form available on our website Employee discount scheme – Dorset Council. It takes less than five minutes and could help grow your business. And if you have any queries, you can email employeediscounts@dorsetcouncil.gov.uk which has an auto reply on with a link to the form as well.
Any local authorities that would like to find out how we linked together different tools to make this Local Discount scheme work are also very welcome to get in touch. They can email me at pete.bartlett@dorsetcouncil.gov.uk
I have worked in communications for 25 years, first as a journalist and then in public and private sector public relations. From Southampton originally, I have lived in beautiful Dorset for the last two decades. My passion for Dorset has also turned into a passion for landscape photography. My other great loves are my family and Southampton Football Club.