Benchmarking: What will you measure and discover in 2025?
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Newsletter: Get to Kensington

Authors and contributors: Alexandra Murphy
Street sign attached to park railings. The sign reads 'The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Kensington High Street W8'.

Keep getting everything you can from your membership

Your events, training and resources

First up, a reminder. There’s still time to join us in London for our last physical event of the year. Come along to work, think, and collaborate with fellow members, academics, start-ups, and some of the biggest names in tech. Our Sustainable and Innovative Places conference will give you new perspectives and motivation to bring back to your day job.

Got a top 5 of useful things for you this week

  1. Don’t forget your first key date for next year: put President’s Conference in your calendar for Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 June 2025. We’ll be back in Birmingham again.
  2. After the success of the 2024 Public Sector Challenge Yorkshire 3 Peaks Challenge, we’re thrilled and excited to announce our next adventure – the London Bridges Walk! Join us on Saturday 18 January 2025, for this family-friendly, walk through the heart of London across all the iconic bridges.
  3. Kevin Taylor, thank you! You became a VP and part of the President’s Team in June and yesterday you chaired your final East region meeting. We will see at the first one in 2025, but at a table hoarding the good biscuits with the rest of us.
  4. Welcome Hazel Lewis and Tanya Allen as new chair and vice-chair respectively for the East. If you’d like to join them there is an opening for another vice-chair. Just let us know. We all look forward to putting together some great meetings and content with you for next year.
  5. You’ve got access to a free 90-minute training workshop: Simplify Your Tasks: Copilot Basics for Microsoft 365 Users. Join on Tuesday 8 October or Wednesday 6 November or Wednesday 4 December.

Take care. I hope you’re able to have a great weekend.

Best wishes,

Alex.

Illustration of a woman reading an oversized book, entitled, 'Local gov's big book of ideas'.

In Your Resource Hub

NEW People make places

Planting the flag for mission-oriented innovation in public services

NEW (and a reminder) in AI@Socitm

Join the Copilot Innovation and Collaboration Sub-Group (part of Microsoft’s monthly Local Gov Innovation and Collaboration Forum). It’s co-chaired by Andy Kennell (Somerset) and Tony Ellis (Buckinghamshire). They meet monthly with a core agenda of ROI, where to start your CP journey, social care, integration to back-office systems, and governance.

Want to add your own content? Let us know on hello@socitm.net or use the contact us form [choose Research as your area of interest].
Help each other connect the dots.

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Watch: ALT text is a science AND an art
Alternative text for images is one of the most universal and impactful things we can do for web accessibility. Start with the fundamentals and then dive into the nuance, with Jessica Chamber from Silktide.

Watch: The South Hams Citizen Hub Story
Join Mike Ward as he takes you through their inspiring digital transformation journey. Discover how they used Netcall’s Citizen Hub to start small, think big, and grow their digital capabilities.

For ease of viewing, the recordings are divided into easy to navigate chapters, with subtitles and transcript available via the video player toolbar.

Browse the Resource Hub

You will need a user account on socitm.net to access member-only resources. Let us know if need any support.

Socitm Says
Browse all episodes of Socitm Says

Accessibility and inclusion

Check your Silktide Score. If you’re competitive, see where you’re council ranks in the index for October. It’s not all about being #1. Rochdale is up 156 places to 22!! Incredible. Congratulations Rochdale.

It’s not all about being #1. Neath Port Talbot Council is up 52 places to get into the Top 12. Amazing work!

Digital Accessibility Maturity Assessment
The DAMA is a comprehensive self-assessment of your current level of digital accessibility maturity.

PAUSE
Creating fair and equitable organisations and services is everybody’s responsibility. Take time to reflect and review on your approach and identify where there may be gaps in the way in which you do things. Pause – reflect – act

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Join us London at Socitm's next conference...Sustainable and Innovative Places. 10 October 2024.

(People make) Sustainable and Innovative Places

09:30 to 16:00 | Thursday 10 October | London W8 5SY

Your To Do list is getting longer. You might even have more than one (especially if you’re a Productivity Ninja). There’s always more to think about and plan and then do.

Conference co-chairs Kurt Frary and Yogita Popat will be talking about their lists and projects and how they manage them.

Weighing up the benefits of delivering projects needs to be about more than just measuring a financial RoI. It also includes the benefits to health, environment and society.

Next week’s conference day is dedicated to people and places. What you can do to support them and how you do it is a Big Thing. Tackle it with us, and with Kurt and Yogita.

Register for the conference day
7th Digital Leaders Week UK. 14 to 18 October 2024. Be part of the UK's national week accelerating digital transformation.

Dive into all things digital and AI. Whether you’re exploring Generative AI, learning about AI for Good, mastering data-driven decision-making, or championing digital inclusion, there’s something for everyone!

With >150 expert speakers, you’ll get access to thought leaders shaping the digital future. Best of all? Every event is completely free.

Submit a talk
Got an online talk that you’d like to share? Then the organisers would love to hear from you.

Learn more
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Training

Don’t let your training points expire! Get yourself onto training for the new academic year now 🙂

How was your course? Tell us about it and be a training champion 🙂

In-person leadership training

Place-based Leadership
Are you leading a department/service but want to do more and do it better? Give yourself that challenge on:
Thursday 14 and Friday 15 November | Manchester | 4 points

Top Talent
Do you want to lead a department/service? Top Talent will help get you there.
Wednesday 23 and Thursday 24 October | Durham | 4 points

Online core skills courses (with some 2025 dates)

Your annual membership includes training1
Want to spend some training points but not sure how? Don’t have enough or you’ve run out? Let us know.

Your guide to using training points

What don’t you know?

Survey end users’ skills to prioritise your future training needs. Get started with a user skills survey.

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Socitm infographic - benchmarking 2024

Better data improves everything

You want evidence to support your business cases, and insight into positive changes you can make. Get a concise overview of your service coupled with data to support it.

Don’t get beaten by a lack of data

With benchmarking you can compare the size, performance and cost-efficiency of your ICT. Leaving you free to concentrate your efforts for improvement. Or make a case for improved funding.

Benchmarking in pictures
National conference Sheffield 2024

Events

Member-only meetings

Meet people for catching-up, problem sharing (and solving) and great networking.

Free webinars and meetings hosted by Socitm

Missed one? Recordings of Socitm webinars are available in the Resource hub.
Webinars are open to anyone in the public sector, membership is not necessary, so please do share them with your network.

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Mostly free webinars and events hosted by partners and others

October

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December

Come and say hello

Thank you for reading (or scrolling) this far! Just one more thing…

You’re eagle-eyed and have read and inwardly digested everything in this week’s newsletter 😉 In which case you’ll have spotted the mention of Productivity Ninja.

Whether you aspire to be one or have no idea what on earth this is all about….discover Think Productive and their free workshops. I’m a Productivity Ninja in progress (always “in progress” because I let things slide and then have to get myself back in the saddle fully aware that I will fall off again, but in the hope that it’ll take longer next time).

  1. Log in to your user account for an up-to-date number of available training points on the day that you check. Your colleagues could have already used some! ↩︎