24 Digital was engaged by the City of Greater Bendigo to drive its strategic direction for the council moving towards becoming a ‘smart city‘ of the future.

The Challenge

Helping a city council to become 'the world's most liveable city'

The City of Greater Bendigo (COGB) is a regional Victorian city with a growing population (top 20 in Australia) and the council institution is striving to make Bendigo ‘the world’s most liveable city’ for the current and future population.

Their team have been working successfully in the Smart Cities space for almost 2 years and were challenged with bringing their Executive Leadership Team, Councillors & Wider organisation on the ‘smart cities’ journey with them.

24 Digital were tasked to find an approach which would increase understanding and buy-in across the organisation.

Requirements Gathering

Understanding the foundations with a strategic workshop

We began the process with a fully immersive workshop with the COGB team. It was structured in a way that would onboard 24 with enough knowledge to move forward as an extension of COGB’s internal Innovation & Transformation team.

After defining the purpose, business context, key audience drivers and mapping out the current existing eco-system of work, we had a clear direction and two major findings which would drive the strategy: COGB is already a smart city but needed to adopt a Future City mindset.

Collaboration & Design

Creating a narrative to take audiences on a journey

Following the workshop the 24 team designed a narrative to take audiences on a journey. The goal of the narrative is to understand where the City of Greater Bendigo has come from, what they have been doing in the Future City space, and where they need to be heading to achieve their mission of being ‘the world’s most liveable city’.

Working closely with COGB we created a strategic document to be presented to the Executive Leadership team and Councillors. The document tells the story of how COGB has progressed in the smart cities space.

The team received support & buy-in for the approach and received approval to move forward with the creation of a Future City roadmap.

Additionally, the document can be used to generate support to broader audiences including residents, business owners and city dwellers of Bendigo.

Stand-out Moments

Behind the scenes with City of Greater Bendigo

COGB provided full visibility around the context of what their challenges were and how 24 could help design success together with them on this project.

Much of the project was done via Google Docs - live editing and feedback which condensed four workshops down to two. It was very effective real-time decision making, saving time, money and travel time between Bendigo and Melbourne.

City of Bendigo changed their way of working by presenting an in-progress document for collaboration with the Executive Team before presenting a final version for review. This saved time and implemented co-design principles into their way of work.