About the Government Communication Academy

The Government Communication Academy is an organisation within the Dutch central government focused on strengthening and further developing communication disciplines. They do this by organising training sessions and events, and by sharing up-to-date knowledge and content for communication professionals, both within and beyond the Dutch government.

An important tool for the Academy is its online community: “Ons CommunicatieRijk”. This community runs on the Harmonics platform by Winkwaves and is used to facilitate the network of communication specialists within the government sector. The community has existed since 2014 and now serves around 4,000 to 4,500 active professionals.

Out of the box, Harmonics is highly suitable for community building and communication. However, the Academy also had a clear ambition: to use the platform more as a Course Administration System. And that was exactly where the challenge began.

The Situation Before Automation

Each year, the Academy organises around twenty training courses, with an average of ten to twelve participants per course. On paper, this seemed manageable, but administratively it could become quite intensive.

Participants registered through an external form on communicatierijk.nl, where they had to complete ten to fifteen fields. These registrations were then received via email or Excel and manually transferred into an internal Excel file functioning as a CRM system.

All the manual copying and processing of data created unnecessary administrative work and increased the risk of mistakes.

Possible consequences included additional correction work, miscommunication and less personal interaction — while personal attention is one of the Academy’s key priorities. When their full-time support staff member (traffic coordinator) was no longer available, the urgency to work more efficiently suddenly became much greater.

The Challenge

Through Winkwaves, Harmonizer became involved with the following question:

How can we automate the registration and administration process without losing the personal touch?

The Academy had several key requirements:

• less manual work
• fewer errors
• better integration with the existing community
• maintaining room for personal interaction where it adds value

There was also a broader ambition behind the project: could Harmonics — with the help of Harmonizer — also function as a fully-fledged Course Administration System?

The Role of Harmonizer

Instead of building a traditional integration with external systems, we chose a different approach with Harmonizer: adding smart automations on top of Harmonics.

This meant:

• no integration with an external system
• instead: extracting, analysing and using data already available within the platform
• and triggering automated follow-up actions based on that data

Together with the Academy, we reviewed the entire registration process. This resulted in a wishlist of around thirty points, which we ultimately streamlined into ten core processes focused on communication and training administration.

The Solution

The core of the solution? Moving the entire registration process into the community itself.

In addition, we implemented several automations, including:

• automatically reminding participants when information is missing
• automated notifications when deadlines (such as free cancellation periods) expire
• automatic confirmations and welcome emails
• timely reminders ahead of training sessions
• generating registration lists for financial and administrative processing

As a result, Harmonics was effectively expanded into a system that also supports the administrative handling of training programmes — without requiring any changes to the platform’s core.

Simple, recurring communication is now fully automated, while more complex questions are handled personally by the secretariat.

What Does It Deliver?

Although exact time savings are difficult to measure, the benefits for the Academy are clear:

Fewer Errors

Because much of the participant information is already available within the community — such as names, email addresses and organisations — and manual copy-pasting is no longer required, the risk of errors has been significantly reduced.

More Room for Personal Contact

Automating standard processes frees up time for personal attention where it truly matters.

Better Service for Participants

Participants receive timely and consistent information and experience the process as clear and user-friendly.

Greater Ownership Among Colleagues

The direct colleagues (8–9 team members) who work with the community while organising training sessions feel more involved with the platform and are becoming more active as true community managers.

Up-to-Date Information

Participants and prospective attendees are encouraged to review and update their information, which is especially important in an environment where people regularly move between organisations.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone

An additional benefit of the implementation? Participation in training sessions is now directly linked to the community. Anyone who wants to participate must become a member first.

This acts as a natural incentive and contributes structurally to a more active and growing community.

About the Collaboration with Harmonizer

Irene and Udo are very positive about the collaboration:

“Harmonizer actively challenged us, responded quickly to questions and gave us plenty of room to work together on better solutions. That combination of strategic thinking and practical execution made the collaboration especially valuable.”

In Short…

By carefully analysing processes and automating them intelligently with Harmonizer, the Government Communication Academy has created a future-proof registration and administration system.

A system that is more efficient, less error-prone and contributes to stronger personal contact with participants.