Star date: 29th July 2020

JUST 43 PEOPLE PER DAY CLICKED ON 'GROUNDBREAKING' MY CITY SALFORD WEBSITE

The My City Salford website, launched in 2017 with £180,000 public money from Andy Burnham's Greater Manchester Transformation Fund, had an average of just over 43 people per day visiting it during 2019, with a tiny 678 total visits this year. 

The site, lauded as a "groundbreaking citizen-centric project" and a "21st century digital neighbourhood" was unobtainable and derelict recently, but is now back online as just a directory.

Full details here...

Back in October 2017, Salford City Council launched a new website My City Salford, or www.mycitysalford.com , which was supposed to be a "21st century digital neighbourhood" and a "groundbreaking citizen-centric project", created with £180,000 of public money from Andy Burnham's Greater Manchester Transformation Fund.

The contract to build My City Salford was handed to Salford Council's own private company The Landing, within a 'Tech and Innovation Hub' in MediaCityUK, but the site has never worked or taken off.

A year after it launched, the Salford Star put in a Freedom of Information request and the response revealed that the site had a mere 837 registered users, and during September 2018 had just 1,738 unique users, or an average of 58 people per day.

If that wasn't bad enough, a further Freedom of Information request shows that up until July this year there had been just 678 unique visitors, while for the whole of 2019 when the site was operating 'fully' it had 15,883 unique readers or an average of just 43.5 visitors per day. This is from a Salford population of 254,408.

Surely, with information needed by the community during the coronavirus crisis, My City Salford would have been the perfect platform – but the site was initially derelict for a 'redesign' and currently has either an 'internal error' showing that it is unobtainable, or appears redirected as just a directory of services hosted by Salford Council's own website rather than its domain name. It's now called My City Directory.

Meanwhile, a new Salford Locality Plan 2020-25 from the Salford Health and Wellbeing Board, which aims to improve health and wellbeing in the city, insists that My City Salford will be the "enabling platform for all of our city and neighbourhood delivery of services" and is asking residents to pledge to use the website "to find local services, events, advice and support in Salford"...

This is all well and good, but the Freedom of Information response from Salford Council states that there is no budget in place for My City Salford this financial year.

For a full background see previous Salford Star article: Just 58 People Per Day Visit £180,000 Salford Council website - click here