Customer case
One of the important things the Province of Utrecht does is inform and communicate. That costs time and money if you do not set it up efficiently. For the Province of Utrecht we built custom tools to send news updates automatically on working days, with content (news and events) from RSS feeds.
1Context
The Province of Utrecht has to inform residents and stakeholders well and regularly, and that has to fit within strict compliance frameworks. Think of privacy legislation (GDPR), internal security guidelines (such as BIO2) and accountability requirements. The question was: how do you do that consistently and compliantly, without it becoming a manual job every day?
2Problem
The Province of Utrecht worked with Mailchimp, but ran into two very practical issues that directly affect compliance. First, they needed a Dutch solution with data stored in the Netherlands, so that privacy and compliance requirements could be better safeguarded. Second, they were looking for one central system that several departments could use as a common basis, without fragmentation and with clear governance.
There was also a matter of content. Residents and stakeholders want to receive updates that match their interests, such as daily news updates about the energy transition. Collecting, designing and sending news by hand every working day simply does not scale, unless you have an army of gnomes. And an events calendar with upcoming events has to go along too.
3Solution
MailCamp has been set up as the central newsletter environment for the Province of Utrecht. This lets the organisation support departments from one base, with a stable sending set-up, clear management agreements and support that suits a government body with compliance requirements.
An automated solution was built for the daily news service. Every working day a script looks at news items from the agreed RSS sources over the past 48 hours. On Mondays the weekend is included (a longer period). An update is only sent if there are genuinely new items.
The same email gets an events section with meetings taking place between now and roughly one month ahead. Recipients get news and a practical overview of what is coming up, without extra manual work.
Because compliance carries a lot of weight (privacy, accountability and data minimisation), Matomo tracking was chosen as an alternative to Google Analytics. An integration was set up for this, so the province still has insight into usage and results, in a way that fits compliance requirements better than Google Analytics.
Result
The newsletter service now runs largely automatically. That not only saves time but also makes the communication more consistent: updates go out at fixed times, in a recognisable layout, without anyone having to put everything together by hand every day.
More importantly, the approach was designed to support compliance-driven decision-making. Thanks to a central set-up, predictable processes and privacy-friendly analytics, it is easier to show internally that communication within the organisation is set up in a compliant way.
Far less manual cutting, pasting and formatting. Fewer errors thanks to a predictable process and fixed structure.
Several topics and mailing lists are manageable without extra workload.
One central environment with central control, which grows along as more departments join.
In government we always look at price, quality and ease of use when we want to procure applications/SaaS. GDPR and privacy are also high on the award criteria.
MailCamp meets all requirements and expectations. But customer service also counts when deciding whether or not to renew a contract; you do not want to wait 24 hours for an answer because the ‘client success manager’ happens to be in India.
And another real nice-to-have in government: the many options for integrations, where an API is of course the standard.
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