Case Study: Government Digital Service (GDS) achieves in‑house user recruitment and a secure, agile research panel with Squiz

Government Digital Service (GDS) - Customer Case Study

The Government Digital Service (GDS), part of the Cabinet Office, needed a secure, compliant way to recruit and track GOV.UK users for research — something spreadsheets and commercial survey tools couldn’t meet under government information security and Data Protection Act requirements. GDS ran a tender and selected Squiz to build a shared user research panel; Squiz used SugarCRM and an agile approach to deliver a lightly configured, exportable solution.

Squiz implemented the panel using commercial open‑source technologies and SugarCRM, enabling GDS to identify participants by the actual GOV.UK content they engaged with and to audit communications. The solution was cheaper year‑on‑year and let GDS scale recruitment in‑house: by February 2019 48,000 unique users had signed up, over 50% of recruitment requests were fulfilled from the database in January 2019, and that rose to 66% in April 2019.

Government Digital Service (GDS)