Explore the decade-long success story of how the Department of Internal Affairs collaboration with government agencies to build New Zealand's first connected life event service.
Having a baby is a major life event, and it comes with a lot of paperwork. Before 2016, expectant parents had no single place to find the services available to them, understand their legal obligations, or work out what to do next. Everything was scattered across multiple New Zealand government systems that didn’t connect. The burden was on families to navigate a fragmented system at one of the most significant moments of their lives. The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) decided that wasn't good enough.
In 2015, DIA set out to fix this as part of a broader government initiative to digitise and connect public services. However, rather than ‘just digitising’ services, DIA brought together the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Social Development, the Inland Revenue Department, Whānau Āwhina Plunket, and the New Zealand College of Midwives to answer a hard question: “Are we designing around department needs, or a real-life moment?”
Together, they agreed the new digitised services should adapt to the needs of expectant parents, rather than requiring parents to adapt to the services. The agencies all agreed to collaborate and consolidate their content into a single, easy-to-use platform covering everything from preparing for pregnancy through to a child’s first six months.
The key objectives were:
DIA needed to find a technical partner that would help them achieve their goals and design a solution for today, while remaining flexible for what’s next. After going to market, DIA decided to work with Catalyst.
Before a single line of code was written, the project team went out to meet a full range of families, in their own homes, all across the country. The project approach was agile and iterative, with community voices shaping every stage. Families of all shapes and sizes needed to see themselves in the service, which meant moving away from a prescriptive one-size-fits-all timeline while keeping all the information whānau actually needed. That commitment to building with communities, not just for them, is what gave SmartStart its direction.
Representing families authentically mattered as much as the content. Rather than defaulting to generic imagery, the design team chose illustration - and made it personal from the start. Team members were the first models. As the project grew, staff brought in photos of their own whānau to inspire illustrations across age groups and cultural backgrounds. Cultural considerations shaped the design throughout, including the Māori worldview that it is important not t
Every illustration was tested alongside the written content to confirm it helped users identify what they were looking for. The design was also built to be fully responsive across devices, so whānau could access it wherever they happened to be.
SmartStart makes a big difference to parents who are time poor. It's like a handbook - all in one place to find what they need and prepare them for that journey.
Building a service meant to serve families for generations required technology choices that would last. It needed to be resilient enough to handle government-scale complexity and designed for future life events or other agencies wanting to reuse the standardised foundations.
DIA worked with Catalyst to build that foundation on open source frameworks using Django and React JS. The choice to use open source meant:
SmartStart acts as a federated data service. Rather than centralising or duplicating data, each agency retained control and protection of the information it holds. Only the necessary pieces, relevant to the life event, are shared across the platform, with privacy and audit rules handled centrally.
SmartStart went live in December 2016, and within its first few years had supported hundreds of thousands of parents. Now, it has had over four million visits. It went on to win awards for innovation, public sector excellence, and design. Governments from around the world wanted to learn from the success of SmartStart and how New Zealand was managing life events.
Joanne Maxell, Senior Business Adviser at the Department of Internal Affairs, shares, “It’s something to be proud of, you can actually see the difference you’re making, that you can extend that work and you just know that they’re helping people.”
More than a decade on, SmartStart has continued to build and adapt from those standardised foundations. It has remained endlessly configurable and continues to meet the changing needs of whānau. The service now includes pre-pregnancy through to age six, and families can:
The federated model and open source foundation that underpinned SmartStart proved its worth beyond a single service. Since SmartStart launched, DIA has used the same approach to deliver further life event services - each one building on what came before and designed around the people who need it.
SmartStart shows what digital leadership looks like in practice, when agencies can create meaningful change for the public, and share that innovation more widely. If you're thinking about what open source technology could mean for your organisation, send us a message.
For over a decade, the Department of Internal Affairs has led cross government collaboration to shape digital services around the moments that matter most to New Zealand citizens.
