The Hidden Potential of Community Spaces: Unlocking Value Through Innovation

Community venue hire is a critical part of our civic infrastructure. People need local, affordable spaces to connect, create and celebrate together. It's where kids find their confidence in after-school programs, anxious parents become friends in antenatal classes and communities unite to create change. Yet these spaces are hard to find, hard to book and suffer from underutilisation, in spite of growing demand. The biggest owner of these spaces is local government and they are either managed by council staff or the service is delivered by the VCO sector. If you've ever tried to book your local council community centre, you'll have experienced the frustration of back and forth email chains, long customer service queues, paper forms and payment issues. It's as if the digital transformation fairy missed the community facilities department! SpacetoCo is an innovative community venues marketplace and powerful enterprise booking and debtor management tool.

Our mission is to make it easier for people to create their communities in local spaces. We do this by partnering with councils and housing associations to create a local bookable ecosystem of community, recreation and arts spaces. Our platform reduces the bookings and payments admin by 80%, creating capacity in stretched teams and reducing cost to serve. However the biggest impact is on revenue growth and utilisation - which means people are getting social value out of these existing critical assets. We currently work with 61 councils and hundreds of VCO managed venues in Australia and New Zealand and we're coming to the UK in 2025. We want to use our pitch to share inspiring stories of what we've built with councils down under and the incredible outcomes it's created. For example, in less than two years, the City of Cockburn in Western Australia has: Grown bookings by 25% Reduced time to handle booking and payments by 70% Reduced customer service call volumes by 62% One thing that's blown us away is how councils use our platform for much more than venue hire. Once we make it easy, all sorts of other opportunities get created. We've seen beach wheelchairs, community buses, dog kennels, busking spots, market stalls and much more made more accessible and bookable to the general public. With one in five councils in the UK at risk of going into administration, community assets like libraries and venues being closed down, we believe we can help keep these services open, make it cheaper and more efficient for them to run and create more social and monetary return on value to our communities.

Our platform can be implemented with no big IT integration in 8 weeks, it is priced to be a net zero cost to council this is a low risk way to get measurable outcomes for both council and the communities they serve. Session Takeaways How to create more value from existing community assets How to improve community wellbeing outcomes by improving findability and booking journeys for local venues How to collaborate better across the ecosystem of asset owners and managers in council, housing associations and VCO sector Inspiration and stories from councils in Australia who are benefitting from this new approach How to reduce the costs of delivering venue hire services Speakers This session will be presented by Elle Bell, a CoFounder and Managing Director of SpacetoCo. If the timing is convenient, we will also ask a representative from the City of Cockburn in Western Australia to co-present and share their learnings on this topic.