Newtownabbey Borough Council

When Newtownabbey Borough Council redeveloped their website, they were keen to introduce as many online services as possible to create a more accessible and convenient channel for their customers. Paul Townsend, E-Communications Officer tells us how a trial run converted to success…

Newtownabbey Borough Council is a local authority lying a short distance north of the city of Belfast. It serves a mixed rural and urban borough with a population of just under 81,000 people. By redeveloping its website and accepting online payments, the Council's aim was to provide a more streamlined process for its customers. Paul Townsend is responsible for the maintenance and development of the Council's website. “Part of this redevelopment was to provide an easier to use method of communication between ourselves the Council and our community” Paul says.

Dog Trials

In Northern Ireland residents who own a dog must by law purchase an annual dog license and their details are kept with their local authority. Acting as a pilot for other transactions they hoped to bring online, the council decided to launch this as their pilot scheme for accepting payments online, with a view to eventually accept credit and debit card payments via the website for all Council services. “We wanted to initially offer our customers the opportunity to purchase dog licenses online due to their relatively inexpensive cost — £5 for a single license and £12.50 for a block license”.

Sage Pay was one of a number of possibilities suggested by the Council’s bank. “As our dog license purchases were to be our first service to be offered online, we had no way of knowing the exact uptake and we also intended to add more services over time. We needed a payment gateway that could offer not only flexibility but also scalability”.

Wagging Tails

The 1000 inclusive transactions per quarter really appealed to Newtownabbey Council, as did the fixed pricing and due to the downloadable integration kits, complete with example scripts, the integration process was extremely straight-forward. “We host our own site in house so could easily do this without the expense of a third party web company. Any questions we did have — like adding additional card types, and enabling 3D secure checks — were quickly answered by email, usually the same day!” says Paul.

“One issue for our customers, and ourselves was online security; although our transaction values were small we still wanted to have a robust, reliable payment gateway with a range of solid security features. The benefit of Sage Pay is that through My Sage Pay, the account management tool, different levels of security and rules can be applied to the transactions. Something that we found very useful", comments Paul.

After soft launching the dog license payments in October, the uptake for online payments proved very successful for the Council. “We officially launched in November and since then our online transactions have continued to grow each month. This is one of the main areas we want to grow so that our customers are able to purchase a full range of Council goods and services through our website”.