It’s been a milestone 12 months for LocalGov Drupal. This year, we reached 50 contributing councils (now 53) and 50 subscribers (from councils and suppliers). There are now over 100 LIVE LocalGov Drupal sites or microsites.
It’s an exciting time for the project. The platform is fast becoming the sector standard, and many councils are switching to LocalGov Drupal when vendor contracts expire.
Our community has created a best-in-class, well-maintained and trusted platform, but more than that, we’ve built a thriving community of users who work together to improve the distribution and support each other.
Our 50 subscribers are a big part of this community. Their financial (and other) contributions ensure we can continue improving the platform and deepen our community connections.
Thank you to all those who’ve chipped in and contributed.
How we spent your money
The chart below shows spending in our second year.
As you can see, most of our income (62%) was spent on Product Development and Tech.
We think this is how it should be, but we'd always like to spend more on our products, and we’re sure you’ll agree.
The financial contributions we receive ensure our products are as good as they can be for all our users, whether they be service users or content designers.
As income rises with your support, we intend to increase the proportion of income spent on product development and tech.
We want to continue to invest in our products for the benefit of all councils and their users.
We can only do this if councils and suppliers renew their subscriptions and more join us.
Subscription Benefits
The benefits of subscription are obvious: the more councils contribute, the more we can build together and improve the distribution.
We know asking our community and LocalGov Drupal’s on-call developers for help is extremely valuable.
The subscription covers this tech support (mostly through our Slack channel).
Subscriptions also support our work, facilitating collaboration. Our community, content design and product sessions are vital in creating a thriving community that can input into our best-in-class CMS.
The collaboration works well and allows us to bring some fantastic work into core, despite limited funding.
Continued Development and Improvements
Thanks to your contributions, our community's achievements over the last 12 months are phenomenal (even if we say so ourselves).
Here’s a rundown of some of the things we’ve accomplished together:
- A stable version of microsites
- New publications module
- v.2 and v.3 of the elections module
- Enhanced Netcall integrations - AI widget / Design integration / Case integration
- Subsite-extras
- Events v.2
- Content access by path
- Media entity usage
- Service contacts
All the fixes, updates, and improvements are now available to ALL councils. This saves users of our platform a huge amount of time and money.
There is also some very exciting work in the pipeline, especially through our Community Fund, including:
- Elections v4 - supports elections where multiple candidates can be elected in any single ward, also potentially adding proportional representation.
- PDF importer - allows councils to automatically transform PDFs into our new web based Publications content format.
- Insight dashboard - pulls analytics, call centre data and user feedback directly into the content admin view of LocalGov Drupal so that content designers can easily use it to improve site content.
- Quality metrics - provides automated accessibility, readability, page weight and other performance measures to enable better content design.
- Specialist Planning Publishing - discovery project for local plans, design codes and data publishing for planning teams in councils
On our regular roadmap, we’re working on:
- Preview link update
- Service Contacts Updates
- Events version 2
Growing community
We’ve seen many more LocalGov Drupal sites and Microsites launched in the past 12 months, and we’re fast becoming the UK's number one web publishing platform for councils.
Fifty-three councils are now part of our collaboration; most have launched their LGD site. We know many more will be switching to our CMS. This is excellent news, as the more councils that contribute, the stronger the product(s).
In 2024, we also hosted the first annual LocalGov Drupal Camp, which was a huge success. Over 200 participants came to Birmingham to learn more about LGD, solve problems, and consider how to enhance our platform further. Thanks to all who took part.
We also ran a second LocalGov Drupal Week, with over 500 digital professionals participating in 15 online sessions. Thanks to those who contributed.
LocalGov Drupal continues its rapid growth with limited resources. We’re working hard to ensure this continues in 2025, and we hope that councils will play their part by subscribing and contributing in whatever ways they can.