Drupal 8 forms and consultation listing feature for NSW Department of Customer Service

The purpose

To help complete the relaunch of NSW’s whole-of-government website (nsw.gov.au) to Drupal 8, and to deliver on its mission for citizen engagement.

The players

NSW Customer Service is a state government department that aims to give citizens the best customer experience possible, including excellence in digital leadership and innovation across government services.

The challenge

NSW Customer Service was relaunching its central website, nsw.gov.au, to Drupal 8. The majority of the new platform build was being done by PreviousNext, but with a pressing deadline NSW Customer Service wanted to find another provider to build three components key to citizen engagement. The components were a contact form for the NSW Premier, a contact form for the NSW Transport Minister and a new ‘Have your say’ public consultation feature. The forms needed to be built in Drupal 8 and integrated with existing systems. The consultation feature also needed to be built in Drupal 8, and it needed to accommodate specific workflow requirements. All elements had to be delivered within an extremely short time frame.

The solution

The solution involved building two discrete Drupal 8 modules, one that includes the two contact forms and one for the consultation feature.

The forms

The NSW Premier contact form was set up as a Drupal 8 form, but integrated with existing correspondence management systems where certain submissions are submitted via a web service and others as an email in a specific body format.

The NSW Transport Minister contact form was integrated with Salesforce so that once submitted, a case is created in Salesforce and can be managed within the dedicated customer relationship management system. Technically, this was done by setting the form to send the data to a RESTful API that saves to a Salesforce endpoint.

Both forms have a number of different fields (including the ability to add attachments) and also use business and conditional logic. For example, the NSW Premier contact form includes a dropdown with three types of enquiries - Leave a message, Event or Meeting. Depending on which option is selected, the fields below become visible, tailored to the enquiry type.

Both forms were also built and configured to include validation before submission to the relevant integrated system. We also built in the capability for items to be queued and processed, and for failed submissions to be re-tried/re-submitted automatically.

The consultation feature

The ‘Have your say’ feature consisted of three main tasks:

1. Building a new consultation content type in Drupal 8

2. Setting up the associated consultation listing page so NSW Customer Service can display all of its consultations. This includes the detailed consultation page that is associated with the new consultation content type.

3. Building a workflow for external agencies to create consultations

pasted image 0 (1).png

The listing page also includes search and filter options.

In terms of the custom workflow, external agencies have an account set up for them with access to the consultation content type. Once they’ve created or edited a consultation, it goes to the internal NSW Customer Service team for review and publishing.

Delivered on time and under budget

The whole project was delivered within the tight eight-week timeframe ready for site go-live. The project was also delivered well under budget. NSW Customer Service has been able to use the remaining budget for additional development work.

The benefits

The benefits for NSW Customer Service include:

• Salsa’s creation of the two forms and consultation feature ensured the broader site launch happened on time

• The two forms and consultation feature help NSW Customer Service increase citizen engagement by making it easy for NSW residents to communicate with the NSW Government

• The Salsa-developed features completed the relaunch of nsw.gov.au onto Drupal 8

• The new modules have been built as discrete modules without other dependencies, which is beneficial for maintenance and enhancements. The work could also be done in parallel while other work was being delivered, without any impacts.

Why Salsa Digital?

NSW Customer Service put the project out to tender. Salsa won the job based on our detailed and technically rigorous response. We’re also well known in the marketplace for our high Drupal expertise and experience working with government, particularly whole-of-government digital platforms such as GovCMS (federal) and Single Digital Presence (Victoria).

NSW Customer Service has also recently engaged Salsa for additional work based on our delivery of the two contact forms and consultation feature.

Salsa is now also playing an active role in NSW Customer Service building a whole-of-government platform to better connect and consolidate digital assets.