Join our Surveys and Interviews Under the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Innovation Initiative and Help Us Transform Municipal Services

21 December, 2020

Sofia Municipality is currently in the second, Alpha Phase (October-January) of the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Innovation Initiative 2020-2022. The Sofia team continues the regular consultations with the experts from FutureGov – a UK-based change agency that provides Sofia with technical assistance on municipal services optimisation.

The participation of Sofia is being coordinated by the teams of Innovative Sofia and Sofia Green, and the city’s focus is on municipal services redesign and optimisation, based on Life Events – a goal that is in synergy with the strategic vision at the national level and the activities of the state agency “E-government”, and is set in the Strategy for Development of Electronic Government in Bulgaria 2019-2023.

The hypothesis we work on is that: by digitising redesigned resident-facing services and categorising them by ‘Life Events’ we will be able to improve residents’ awareness of, access to and experience of using such services, and achieve an improved relationship between residents and the local municipality.

During Alpha we focus on the services, related to change of address registration (current of permanent address) as part of the life event ‘Moving to/within Sofia’ in order to better understand the overall processes, the experience of the citizens and the administration related to address registration, to analyse the opportunities for service redesign and optimisation, and to identify how we could apply the ‘Life Events’ methodology to other services as well.

 

Share with us your experience and valuable feedback related to change of address in Sofia and get involved in the process of transformation of administrative e-services! 
We would like to invite you to complete an anonymous short questionnaire (The survey will take no longer than 10-15 minutes) by January 15, 2021.

 

We need your valuable feedback!

Is that you?

  • You have updated your current/permanent address in Sofia before
  • You plan to register or update your permanent/current address in Sofia
  • You live in Sofia without having a registered permanent/current address
  • You are a landlord in Sofia who has had to help tenants register their current address or may need to assist them in the future

 

Join our interviews and early prototype testing in 2021!

 

In the coming months, we will continue engaging with residents and staff via questionnaires and interviews, in order to continue to get more information and feedback about the services, related to address registration. We’ll start testing with residents small-scale prototypes that we’ll update weekly based on the feedback we receive. The prototypes will help us analyse what ideas and solutions we could implement, so that they best meet the needs of the citizens and the administration.

If you’re interested in being part of our upcoming user research and interviews in 2021, and to provide feedback on your experience with change of address registration and on our designs for redesign and optimisation of address registration-related services, please contact us via: ana.georgieva@innovativesofia.bg.

The interview data will be fully anonymised and will be used for the purposes of this project only.

We will be happy if you share our invitation and questionnaire with your friends and acquaintances living in  Sofia. Your valuable feedback and opinion will help us design better solutions, related to the optimisation of address registration for Sofia citizens.

 

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More about the project

The Digital Innovation Initiative will take place over a 2-year period and consists of 4 phases. In mid-October we completed the first phase of the 2-year project – Discovery, and started to work on the second, Alpha phase.

During the Alpha phase until the end of January, together with the Future Gov team we are going through a special design process with the design challenge to come up with solutions on how to optimise and simplify available information related to address registration in order to improve awareness of, access to and the overall customer experience related to these services.

 

What we have achieved in Alpha so far

In order to dive deeper into the process journey of address registration, highlighting both the complexity of the journey, the experiences of the administration and the citizens, and the gaps in our current understanding of the process, we:

  • held a meeting with Mr. Traicho Traykov and Mr. Georgi Iliev – District Mayors of Sredets and Slatina – two neighbouring but very socio-economically different districts in Sofia, and discussed broader challenges related to municipal services, including services related to change of address registration. 
  • conducted interviews with: administrators of the address registration service in the Sredets and Slatina districts and citizens with recent experience of changing their address registration and those planning to change their address in the future
  • held the first of a series of regular meetings with representatives of the city of Bratislava, who are also participating in the Digital Innovation Initiative, in order to exchange know-how and best practices related to municipal services

This helped us to better understand the process of address registration from both resident and staff perspectives. We would like to once again thank Mr. Traykov and Mr. Iliev, the representatives of their administrations and the citizens who have taken part in our interviews!

Our team continues to analyse all the interviews this round and group them into common themes,  which we then refine into clear insights in order to prioritise a design challenge to move forward with, and begin developing early prototypes and a testing plan for the next phase.

 

What lies ahead in Alpha

We are currently at a stage where our understanding of how the address registration services work, how citizens perceive and use them will allow us to generate ideas. By the end of January, we aim to:

 

 

Look out for our next blog where we will give an update on the ideas we are testing and what we’re learning in 2021.