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E-government aims to improve the lives of citizens and make government agencies more efficient and accessible, but it is well known that most e-government systems fail to achieve this. This paper describes an approach to e-government that is designed to promote trust in government and increase public participation in local government initiatives, in addition to providing real benefit to the public. We propose six key characteristics for successful e-government applications, and a user-centred design. The approach was tested by implementing a system for water and energy conservation that could be accessed via the Web or on MXit. The project comprised an immersion phase followed by continuous prototype evaluation of both the Web and MXit interfaces. The system allows users to access their water and electricity account histories and to see the effect of changed appliance usage on their monthly bills and on the environment. Evaluation among working class and middle class users showed the Web-based system is easy to understand and highly usable (scoring 83% on the SUS questionnaire). Results also clearly show that MXit is not viable for e-government since few rate payers use MXit, and those who do not are not prepared to use it in order to access the system. Regarding conservation, the majority of users expressed a keen interest in introducing savings measures after using our system. Future work will involve applying the approach in other e-government projects, and evaluating the long-term impact of the existing conservation system. To this end a monitoring tool has been created to track system usage and measure how this correlates with consumption changes.