Boom times for FixMyStreet

Each of the previous three months has been a record-breaker for FixMyStreet. In January, you made the highest number of reports in the site’s history… until February. And then that record was smashed again in March with over 17,000 reports across the month.

FixMyStreet has been running since 2007, and it’s enjoyed increasing usage over that time, as you’d expect any site to do organically. The performance in the last few months, though—a 30% rise from the year before—has been notable. We reckon it’s been driven by a couple of factors.

Grassroots outreach

At mySociety, we tend not to go for big advertising campaigns (read: we can’t afford them), but you might have noticed that we put quite a bit of effort into spreading the word about FixMyStreet at the beginning of the year.

Everything we did was low-cost and designed to help us promote the site to as many new people as possible:

  • We offered a number of downloadable posters and other promotional materials (if you haven’t seen these yet, go and take a look; we think they’re pretty nice)
  • We sent our users a stack of branded postcards that they could share with others to let them know about FixMyStreet
  • We also contacted a large number of community newsletters and magazines, serving towns, parishes and villages across the country: perhaps you saw us featured in your local publication.

Users from council sites

That all paid off, but there was another source of reports helping us achieve our record figures.

That source was our client councils, who have FixMyStreet as the primary fault-reporting system on their own sites.

Eight UK councils currently have FixMyStreet installed, with every report made on via the system on the council site being published on fixmystreet.com, and vice versa.

Between them they’ve added just over 16,500 reports this year.

Riding the wave

So far this year, we’ve seen an overall average of 16,000+ reports per month, and there have been over 50,000 reports since 2015 began.

Now, let’s hope all those reports get some kind of a response, because as the recent research we collaborated on showed, getting something fixed has the power to turn first-time reporters into conscientious, engaged repeat reporters. And that’s all for the good.

 

Image: Jamie Taylor (CC)

3 Comments

  1. huge congratulations – it’s a wonderful service

    my account suggests i have made 183 reports which might not include the early testing days from my dog sh*t hunting in Kings Cross

    in the early days it was especially useful in breaking out of the private service fulfilment/fail cycle with the council where like the bishops tree no one would know if they had failed, to a public one where you could keep pointing in plain view to something that had gone wrong until they fixed it. the ability to have this public lever makes a huge difference in getting things done locally.

    I had the surreal experience a few months ago of sitting in a community meeting in rural oxfordshire where a group of fairly elderly residents discussed in intimate detail the best way to get a pothole fixed using the service.

    long may FMS run and i only hope more councils take it up.