The digital transformation fairy has visited many areas of local government. Residents can pay council tax online, book a bulky waste collection and even the council staff got Microsoft 365.

But it's still woefully difficult to check availability and book a community venue, like halls, meeting rooms and community centre facilities.

This leads to under utilised facilities, inefficient and costly manual booking & payments processes and most importantly, places an unnecessary barrier to helping people connect in local spaces.

At SpacetoCo, we want to make it easier for people to create their communities in local spaces

👋 G'day, we're stoked to meet you.

SpacetoCo is a GovTech partner for local authorities to create a bookable ecosystem of all types of local facilities. It's both a familiar Airbnb style marketplace and a powerful booking and payments platform. Our innovative and easy automation vastly reduces staff time spent on inefficient processes.

Because SpacetoCo isn't a traditional internal council tool, it also allows community trust managed properties, parish council halls, schools, sports clubs and private spaces to participate and take bookings on the marketplace. This instantly increases provisioning of available space to local communities and provides a birds eye view of data insights for how residents use these spaces.

SpacetoCo launched in 2015 and works with over 40 councils and thousands of community venues across Australia and New Zealand. The councils we've partnered with have seen bookings increase by up to 300% and manual admin tasks decrease by 80%.

Why should I care about improving customer journeys for community venue bookings?

At SpacetoCo, we believe making it easier for local spaces to be booked is a catalyst for community wellbeing.

Like local rooms of requirement local halls and venues shape shift for whatever the community needs.

They are like schools because they provide kids after school programs
They are like health centres because they deliver community health access programs
They are gyms and fitness centres because it's where we go for yoga, pilates and bootcamps
They are theatres where local amateur dramatic societies perform
They are therapy centres where social services deliver family counselling
They are churches where people gather to worship

Making it easier for people to meet, create, connect and play in local spaces can deliver huge wellbeing outcomes from a relatively small and easy change to how bookings are managed.

Strategic Facilities Network Planning

Many councils have mapped all their potential options that could bolster provisioning of spaces to communities. They are also devolving expensive assets like halls and community venues to community trust operators to save costs.

Handing over assets for communities to run or getting existing facilities to share their spaces is a fantastic way to cut costs, increase provisioning and build grassroots engagement in what happens in local spaces BUT...

Volunteer groups are rarely given tools by council to help promote their space and manage bookings.
How do local residents know what spaces are actually bookable?
How do you measure the quality of service being delivered by these facilities?
It can feel like a tug of war for both parties to get what they need from each other.