South Waikato District Council (SWDC) is a local government authority serving a rural district in the central North Island of New Zealand, with its headquarters in Tokoroa. Established in 1989, the council focuses on fostering economic growth, providing community services, and maintaining infrastructure for its residents. It is known for its pro-business, solutions-focused approach.
The Challenge
The Community Well-being team, led by Kori Totowera, works with stakeholders covering economic development, tourism, events, community development programs, and social investment including community grants.
The team managed large volumes of stakeholder information without a central system, relying on manual notes and spreadsheets. This also made it difficult to maintain continuity when staff moved on, as there was no single source of knowledge to support smooth handovers and maintain stakeholder relationships.
Kori identified the need to ensure quality assurance, compliance, and consistent engagement tracking with stakeholders, government agencies, and community groups. This capability would strengthen relationships with stakeholders and business partners, support critical conversations and give councillors greater confidence in the team’s ability to deliver its objectives.
The Solution
The Knowledge & technology team had been working with Swift-IA to assess Netcall Liberty Citizen Hub, an intelligent automation and customer experience platform widely used in UK local government.
Liberty enables the Council to quickly create many tailored applications on a common low-code platform, for no additional licence cost.
It was agreed that Liberty would be an excellent tool to meet the needs of the Community Well Being team and the Stakeholder Management System project was initiated.
The Project
A joint project team was created with the Council providing analysis and subject matter expertise and Swift-IA providing Liberty platform support.
An iterative approach was adopted, involving key staff plus a broader subgroup from various council departments for regular testing and feedback over a 10 week period.
A final user acceptance workshop confirmed the system met requirements before approval to go live in December 2025.
Benefits
Already the Council is seeing benefits from improved retention and sharing of engagement information, enhanced transparency, consistent messaging across teams, better control of community investment reporting, and support for informed decision-making with data and insights.
Cost and efficiency gains are also expected from utilising one flexible platform (Liberty) for multiple use cases instead of subscribing to many separate systems.
The Council now have two certified Liberty developers in their team, giving internal capability to design and implement innovative intelligent automation solutions for the future.
The Future
There areplans to expand usage across the wider organisation and align with the council’s overall community engagement strategy.
Kori Totowera states “Our team and Swift-IA have worked incredibly well together to deliver a much needed capability in a very short time-frame. I am excited at the possibilities this gives my team and the ongoing opportunities it provides.”
The Liberty platform also creates opportunities to share applications and developments with other forward thinking councils using Liberty, fostering inter-council collaboration and innovation without additional costs.
Andrew Robinson, Knowledge & Technology Manager, comments “the Liberty platform gives my team a powerful capability to improve customer and staff experiences and we can now focus on delivering Citizen Hub to better serve our citizens more effectively and cost efficiently”
