This month's highlights...

Continual success – pages viewed

The trend for pages viewed on tellmescotland continues to grow with the period 1 February 2014 to 31 July 2014 showing there were 186,588 pages viewed, and on average four pages looked at per visit.

Mobile traffic continues to grow as a percentage of total traffic. Over the six month period, 44.80% of the total site visits were from mobile devices (19,736 visits) – up from 42.22% in the previous period. The Tablet/Mobile Phone split is roughly equal although the slight gap in favour of the former continues to widen – 22.12% tablet and 19.84% mobile phone on the six month figures.

For Social Media traffic, Facebook had 184 visits and 363 page views. Twitter had 56 visits and 72 page views. The majority of the Facebook visits were on a single day – 23 July – and were mainly concerning an emergency road closure in Inchinnan in Renfrewshire. The Twitter visits were mostly linked with a closure for the Queen's Baton Relay, also in Renfrewshire.

Over the six month period, Facebook accounted for 74.91% of social traffic with Twitter providing almost all the rest with 22.95%. Overall social media provided 2.39% of all traffic.

Engagement

There are 28 councils uploading to tellmescotland and we continue to engage with all service areas across these councils to ensure full implementation. There is positive progress with Argyll and Bute and Orkney Islands Councils. More detail will be provided at the next Public Information Notices Steering Group Meeting planned for October 2014.

There are also 17 other wider Scottish public sector organisations adopting the portal, with agreement reached to include Transport Scotland in the near future. 

We would encourage all councils to consider uploading all notices to tellmescotland rather than just statutory notices. This is based on feedback from Community Councils members, who have advised that they would find the portal more useful if all relevant public information was published by councils. There are excellent examples of General Notices being published including Aberdeen City Council on Elected Members’ Surgeries, and The Moray Council on the Council’s Citizen Panel.

Other news...

Developments

• A number of councils continue to adopt  the Generic XML functionality and meetings have taken place, as well as other meetings planned, to discuss how to take this forward, building on the success led by Aberdeen City Council. Glasgow City, West Dunbartonshire and Fife Councils are assessing the next steps to adopt this functionality. 
• The WDM integration work to integrate the notice procedure between Symology and the WDM Roads Management System continues to progress, led by East Lothian Council integrating East Lothian workflow into the noticing procedure. It is planned that a prototype will be ready by September 2014 for demonstration.
• As part of the mygovscot/myaccount technical infrastructure platform, we will be taking the next steps to ‘virtualise’ the PINs server, to integrate with the wider hosting environment at Brightsolid. This will also enable implementation of the approved improvements around the new Mapping service and RSS Feeds.
• A scoping meeting on the Social Media Pilot Project has taken place involving colleagues from Aberdeen City and West Dunbartonshire Councils, Alastair Blair (the Potent Mix), and Improvement Service. More information will be provided at the next meeting of the Public Information Notices Steering Group.

Promotion and communications

There was an impressive stand hosted by Spider Online featuring tellmscotland at the Digital Government Conference held in Westminster, London on 8 July 2014 attended by Tina Mclelland

There was also a full engaged breakout session led by John Campbell (Spider Online) and Alistair Blair (thepotentmix) on "A digital success story – How the public sector can engage citizens and still save up to 30% on its budget". The English & Welsh colleagues valued hearing how Scotland and the engaged organisations had progressed with the project and discussions to engage others in our shared learning continues. All feedback is appreciated.

We continue to engage with Community Councils to raise awareness of tellmescotland, encourage them to use the portal, and to request their help in promoting the portal in their local communities using their existing networks and communication channels.  Remember that the tellmescotland News page can be used by any Council or Other Organisation to draw attention to any items of particular interest. News items can be uploaded within the Admin site.