LocalGov Drupal has just begun its fourth year of financial independence, a collaboration of 60 councils and 150 live sites. It’s something that makes me extremely proud, and I’ll be forever grateful to the amazing people who’ve helped us get this far.

If you’ve followed the LGD story, you’ll know we started with just two councils – Brighton & Hove and Croydon. Financial support from the UK Government’s Local Digital Fund between October 2019 and December 2022 helped genericise our code and grow the community.

In January 2023 we launched Open Digital Cooperative, backed by members and a board drawn from our councils and suppliers. Since then we’ve forged ahead thanks to subscription fees for councils and suppliers who see the value in pooling money and expertise. 

As far as I know, ours is the only Local Digital Fund project that has achieved financial sustainability. I’m often asked why that is, and this blog post is my first attempt at explaining it.

Straightforward things done well

This blog post covers six ideas initially, and there’s a lot more I’m still unpacking. I don’t think any of them alone are particularly mind blowing, but the combination of them, their execution, and the focus and staying power required probably is.

I’m expecting to return and add to this post as new thoughts hove into view. It’s likely that further posts will spin out of this one – if there’s anything here you want me to elaborate on, just ask. There’s also a new model (or models) for public sector collaboration in my head which I’ll publish soon.

So, to learnings. Why did LGD become a going concern, and how does that help other public sector projects trying to do the same thing? 

I’ve realised the answer isn’t simply making carbon copies of the LGD setup for different sectors. Web publishing has a particular set of characteristics, including a DDaT heavy audience. Other sectors such as planning, revenues and benefits or adult social care are different, and not everything we’ve done will work. Instead I’ve been thinking about principles that might apply across the board.

1 Make a product that councils can invest in

This principle sounds obvious, but it’s probably the most crucial one. I’ve seen many similar projects stall because they ran out of money before they could offer something councils would pay for. As the cash dried up, the funded teams disbanded and it was left to heroic volunteers to keep things going. Or no one at all.

A good product market-fit It takes time, money and patience. It was over five years from our initial building work in Brighton & Hove to the launch of the Open Digital Cooperative. During that time we had just enough cash to build for the most common needs, and plan a future model that councils could invest in. Money was extremely tight, and without a handful of councils pledging subscription fees early on we might not have made it.

Austerity has made things tougher. Few councils have surplus cash to try out new ideas, so they often have to retire existing software to free up funds. This means your new software has to wholly replace whatever’s being removed. That can be a tall order.

Ramping up the difficulty even further, councils often buy bundles of software on long contract terms – meaning it’s not enough just to solve a single problem well. New entrants to a market frequently have to tackle needs that are unrelated to where they started, somehow covering the bills while they’re waiting for councils to commit. Fixing underlying market issues would definitely help here.

It’s extremely tricky to build and sustain public sector software. If we want to see more successful public sector collaborative projects, there needs to be sufficient targeted funding and a laser-like focus on what councils will buy into and by when.

2 Provide a service that’s credible and long term

Whenever a council switches software, it’s taking a risk and needs to be reassured that its replacement is credible and will do the job for the long term. 

That’s tricky to show as a new entrant to the market, which LGD was a few years ago. Fortunately we were able to point to actual use: The websites of Brighton & Hove and Croydon councils were already using our code, plus we’re built on Drupal, one of the most well supported content management systems in the world. 

We spent a lot of time in our early days thinking about how to achieve financial stability. After working through several ideas, we settled on small annual subscription payments from a large basket of councils and suppliers to create something stable and long lasting. Our biggest challenge was securing financial pledges from the first few councils and suppliers. To the people who gave us this early support, thank you so much!

Teams working in other sectors might need to go further when managing the risk and uncertainty around councils switching. I’m aware that most of LGD’s council friends and colleagues are from DDaT shaped web teams so are more likely to have heard about concepts such as ‘common needs’ and ideas being ‘safe enough to try’. A Chief Financial Officer, for example, might need more convincing. 

3 Allow councils to join when and how they like

I’m a huge fan of group buying approaches such as the GovSpec laptop event as there’s little need for councils to buy such things individually.

A limiting factor is that they have a specific time window and process – councils have to be ready to join at a set time and follow a set path.  

I totally understand why procurement events are run this way, but we’ve found at LGD that more flexibility works in our favour. Some of our earliest councils got on board immediately, while others took their time. A few have dipped their toe in the water by building a smaller site first, and that gave them the experience and confidence to go further. It can take a council several years to get properly involved with LGD – if it suits them, that’s fine by us.

There’s also variation in how councils get involved. We’ve seen a handful of councils pick up the code (it’s open source and freely available) and only get in touch when they’ve built something.

Some councils have Drupal in their DNA, like our founders Brighton & Hove City Council. They have their own brilliant developers who contribute code and review time, and are highly valued members of our community.

The majority of LGD councils don’t have Drupal skills but are keen to learn, so start with buying a “service wrapper” of sorts. Because of the project-based nature of public sector funding (sadly not team based), councils generally procure a “big bang” web transformation project from one of our suppliers. Once that’s done they either continue with development and hosting from that supplier or take over some aspects themselves.

Our approach is to be open and encouraging of all of these things. The Coop is at a point financially where we’re not reliant on a single council’s decision to switch over to LGD, so they can join when and how they like. The community is open to all, and we have a brilliant Community Manager and free drop-in sessions to cover any questions councils may have.

4 Provide a platform that’s easy to build on

As Product Lead for LGD, I write a newsletter every couple of months detailing upgrades and things we’re thinking about. I’m just finishing the latest entry and it’s telling that most of the work I’ve included is by groups outside of our core team. I think this is the first time it’s happened. 

While we’ve got our head down working through an upgrade to Drupal 11 which all of our councils will be able to easily pick up and use, the community has continued to develop significant new upgrades. 

We’re continually streamlining how people can build what they need on top of Drupal and LGD, and contribute back if it’s something everyone can use. As part of this, we’re holding our first ever Developer Days this week, and I’m really excited – I’ll report back afterwards.

Much of our success is down to the value created by and for community members. As more people and organisations join LGD, the value has grown. It’s quite something to see.

5 Make collaboration feel better than the day job

I’ve held product and delivery jobs in several councils, so can vouch for the fact the work is often relentless and frustrating, but it generally builds into something worthwhile. Austerity has made that harder, and I hear that Local Gov Reorganisation is in some places making things tougher still.

To counter this, the LGD team tries to make our community meetups, drop-ins and communications as useful and transparent as possible. Every event should deliver something useful, and if you can’t attend there’s often the option of watching back later or catching up via our newsletter. 

Our roadmap is open, and Slack provides the means to ask questions and suggest new features. Getting something done shouldn’t mean a lengthy bureaucratic process.

If our community members see value and actively want to take part, it builds trust and goodwill – we get more done and need fewer processes and paperwork to deliver it.

6 Execute well on a shoestring budget

The make up and all-round amazingness of the LGD core team needs a blog post of its own. Briefly though, we’re still here because team members do multiple jobs, bill for part time hours but deliver full time value, and focus on always delivering for councils. 

I’d say it’s as much about execution as ideas, but there’s thousands of internet posts saying that! Instead I’ll reflect on how we’ve changed what we deliver over time and why, and try to post something that’s useful. Happy to answer any questions in the meantime.

Thoughts welcome

So that’s everything in my head right now. Hopefully this will spark a few meaningful chats about collaboration in the public sector.

Please comment and ask questions as they will definitely prompt more ideas, which I’ll either add here or to another post. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.