After Durham, Darlington was our second council partnership. We went from first conversation to live data in just eight weeks. Here's how.
Week 1–2: The intro
We emailed the waste management team with a simple pitch: we'll build a free reminder service for your residents, funded by an optional 99p SMS upgrade. No cost to the council, no data we don't need, full GDPR compliance.
Week 3–4: Data assessment
Darlington had a surprisingly clean dataset — a CSV export from their routing software, updated weekly. The main challenge was mapping their internal bin codes to human-readable labels.
Week 5–6: Integration and testing
We built the sync pipeline, ran it nightly for two weeks, and compared our output against the council website. We caught three edge cases: a cul-de-sac with a different collection day, a new housing estate not yet in the data, and a garden waste suspension that wasn't flagged.
Week 7: Soft launch
We invited 200 early-access signups to test. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with one recurring request: "Can I add my mum's address too?"
Week 8: Full launch
47,000 households now covered. We sent a joint press release with the council, which drove a surge of signups and validated the partnership model.
Lessons learned
Talk to the people who actually manage the data, not the comms team. Be honest about what you need and what you don't. And always, always test with real postcodes.