INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

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Work > Institute of Public Administration

The Institute of Public Administration (IPA), based in Dublin is Ireland’s only public service development agency, focused exclusively on public sector development. For the last 53 years the IPA have commissioned the printing of a hardback book, known as “Ireland – A Directory”.

It is an inclusive and extensive directory with approximately 9,000 organisations, covering both the private and public sector. The IPA first approached Scaffold Digital in late 2018 with the desire to re-create this book in digital format as a mobile app for both iOS and Android, alongside a bespoke content management system.

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OBJECTIVES

The IPA realised the needs of their customer base was changing, they wanted to offer them a digital solution to replace the hardback book.

The cost of producing the hardback book was expensive and the process to produce to book was laborious taking into account, collating all of the content, designing the style of the book, contracting external typesetters and printing. This ultimately drove up the cost of the book. The IPA wanted to get content in front of their users quickly, with less overhead/cost and develop a more affordable and reliable revenue stream. Outside of their core KPI’s the IPA required us to import 15,500 content entries from a QuarkXpress file into the mobile app prior to live launch, with it also being fully manageable via the content management system for QA.

“Scaffold Digital produced exactly what we wanted and exceeded our expectations. The search functionality was a huge part of this project and what has been developed is so simplistic and works really well for our users. We enjoyed having a dedicated project manager who answered our queries with no delay. Overall, the team dealt with any unexpected requests quickly, efficiently with no impact to us.”

John-Paul Owens / Publishing, Research & Corporate Relations

THE OUTCOME

The IPA now have a mobile app for iOS and Android, alongside a cloud-based content management system to manage the app and it 15,500 pieces of content, completely digitising the hardback book.

We have created a new revenue model for the IPA by developing a subscription feature, with users paying monthly for access to gated content, whilst also incentivising them with access to some free content. We have significantly reduced their time to market from 6 months to a matter of minutes and heavily reduced costs year-one-year with a predicted saving of €75,000 over 3 years.