About Us:
eTownz Dashboard helps to better plan & coordinate community development activity. The dashboard also faciltates the workings of a community council, join the dots and helping to manage local projects.
The platform connects key local stakeholders, clubs, businesses, public services, and residents so they can identify their goals and take action on any number of development themes e.g. economy, environment, wellbeing.
eTownz Community Development Process: The 5 Step Plan
The community council is composed of a hierarchy of different teams each of which focuses on a community development theme. Each team undertakes the following 5 step process to organise their activity.
STEP
01
BASELINE AUDIT
To acknowledge, database, profile our…
1. Local Assets
2. Local Goals
3. Local Projects
4. Local Stakeholders
STEP
02
OPINIONS
Gain ideas and feedback from…
1. Local Businesses
2. Local Clubs/Groups
3. Local Service Providers
4. Local People
STEP
03
MANAGEMENT
Organise and formalise a structure for continued local development
1. Develop a Community Management Team/ Council
2. Create sub-teams to action project ideas
3. Build a local volunteer base
4. Make volunteering fun and effective
STEP
04
PLAN
Co-create a local plan to make your community a better place to live and work
1. Prioritise local goals
2. Select suitable projects to address goals
3. Define how and when projects will be implemented
STEP
05
ACTION
Provide structure for continual development & review
1. Agree how & where teams will meet & report on progress
2. Strength communications & cross-community participation
3. Regularly get feedback, measure progress against goals
Key User Benefits
eTownz Dashboard helps better plan and coordinate community development activity.
The platform connects key local stakeholders, clubs, business, public services and local residents so they can identify their goals and take action on any number of development themes eg. economy, environment, wellbeing.
eTownz allows for the creation of a community council, the council can have numerous sub-teams based on the eTownz Development themes.
Local businesses, residents, community groups, and public service providers have a collective interest, to make the community a better place to live and work.
eTownz helps to amplify all great work undertaken by your local sports clubs, schools, development committees and organisations of all types.
Benefits / User type
eTownz brings together different stakeholders from around the community with various benefits for these stakeholders.
E.g. GAA, Chamber of Commerce, School Parents Boards, Tidy Towns, etc.
Understanding::
Create a profile of your club illustrating to people the projects you undertake or events you manage.
Collaborate::
Identify opportunities where local people or organisations can help your club achieve its goals.
Build Support::
Your club can increase its membership, attract support, and gain support in achieving its goals by working closely with the wider community.
E.g. Local retailers, desk-based freelancers, artists, and food specialists.
Partnerships:
Identify new partnership opportunities with other local business
Clusters:
Create business clusters around food, IT, and other business areas so business owners can enjoy collective development and business support locally.
Engage:
Collaborate with other local stakeholders to help develop the local economy & create job opportunities.
E.g. Local retirees, local parents, local youth, regular visitors, and foreign friends.
Getting Involved:
Become more engaged with your community, see what’s going on, and get involved.
Grow Volunteer Base:
Encourage new volunteers to participate in local activities.
Support Existing Volunteer Network:
Support the stalworth volunteers in your community.
E.g. Council Councils, Development Organisations, County Sports, Health, Environment or Business groups.
Asset Mapping:
Helps organisation that are coordinating activities at a county level to better understand the key attributes and gaps
Data-Based Development:
Leverage census, live register, crime and other data sources, visualised and customised to illustrate the story in each county
Communications:
To improve how county bodies communicate and project manage activities with the local community partners
E.g. Sports organisations, environmental organisations, health service coordinators, and trade organisations.
Vertical Planning:
Build a hierarchy of your organisation’s plans. Local plans should tie to regional and national plans through alignment of goals & project plans.
Vertical Management:
Coordinate roll-out of new projects across your network of regional and local nodes.
Vertical Communications:
Coordinate top down messaging and communications strategies.
Community Development Themes
So what does eTownz do? It allows all local stakeholders to co-create and maintain a community development plan & facilitate greater collaboration and local support for projects.
Let’s start with the themes. Basically there are lots of them. But to cut a long story short, there are 4 top tier themes:
References
Community rejuvenation, development and sustainability are increasingly key issues of concern within both a community and policy context, not only from an Irish perspective, but also on an international basis. Having carried out extensive work within the context of community and rural development, the issues that lie ahead are not, should communities initiate change for survival, but how do they go about doing this? eTownz are developing a holistic online platform that will allow communities, not only to explore the advantage and disadvantages of their community, but also to provide a clear direction of progression into the future. eTownz is both innovative and novel, has an identifiable market within Ireland and beyond and can assist in bringing local, small or large communities into an age where the internet can play a key role in igniting community development and sustainability.
Laois Partnership have hired the services of eTownz for a variety of different projects over the past 8 years. We have found eTownz to be professional, knowledgeable and provide an innovative approach to local development.
I would foresee significant potential for eTownz and the eTownz community development tools in the coming year. The relatively new concept of “Smart Towns and Villages” is a concept which seeks to provide a more data and evidence based approach to local development and is being heavily championed at EU level by the EU commissioners and relevant departments most especially ENRD which is related to the leader development funding mechanism used across Europe.
We found eTownz to provide a professional level of service, adaptable to the needs of our community and creative in the approach and support of our actions. We would certainly recommend eTownz to other communities around Ireland and wish them the very best for the future.
What Pat and eTownz are developing is a set of tools that will make a lot of the ‘hard’ stuff easier, by creating a platform which enables all members of the community to share in defining priorities and plans and to work together inclusively to better and better effect. Put simply, the future of our communities depends on how well people work together. If we can get the technology right to support this, then that can make a tremendous difference.
Pat Kennedy and the team at eTownz submitted a project as part of a competition entitled www.Knowledge4dev.org and were invited to participate in the national finals. Both myself and the other judges were very impressed with the online development platform being worked on by them. We hope over the coming years to develop synergies with their system in the future and we see huge possibilities for their solutions in the international development sector across the world. We are currently scoping possible applications within our projects in Ireland and overseas.
eTownz Research & Development History
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