Turning Data Insights and Analysis into Action

Commentary

by Ian Ferguson, Strategy and Development Director for pfbbUK.

When towns and cities are grappling with re-invention from retail destinations to community hubs to meet the needs of their catchment, those managing ‘places’ don’t have unlimited time or resource, so how they use it really matters.

There are three key things you need to support you to do this well. A real understanding of who uses your town or city centre, a way of knowing how to prioritise your work and an ability to measure the outcome of anything you do.

Understanding who uses your town or city centre relies upon having data which is robust and reliable to provide basic information about gender, age, income profile, where people live and the numbers of workers and visitors in your town centre. Without this you will not be able to identify what part of the local population are visiting and working there and who are not.

You also need to understand the behaviour of those using your town centre. You probably know the days when your town is busy and when it is not, but do you really understand why the days behave differently? Knowing ‘why’ is the first step in making decisions in what you do to improve the health and vitality of your town centre.

There are many factors which affect the performance of your town centre, but where do you prioritise and focus your limited time and resources? Some factors will have more influence over the ability of the town centre to attract people than others but there are some over which you have no control to change. You can’t do everything, so deciding what not to focus on is just as important as deciding what you do.

Understanding the difference between what you can control and which factors have the most impact is key to making change as effective as possible. It is then about being clear about what matters most – referring back to the behaviour of those who visit your town centre.

A piece of research undertaken by the Institute of Place Management identified that there are 237 key factors which impact upon the health and vitality of a town or city centre. When these factors were reviewed to determine which had the most influence and over which anyone could have control, it boiled down to just 25 that really make a difference and can be influenced locally.

Even within these there are decisions to be made to how these relate directly to the best of your town and city centre and which have the most opportunity to do something about. Using the data you have about the behaviour of those who use your town centre then provides a solid platform against which to make decisions about where you and your partners invest time and money.

When making these decisions, the biggest risk is making assumptions about your visitors or using data which is unreliable. There are many data providers out there, but fundamental qualities of credible data sets are: sample size, control of the data source, consistency and reliability, and data protection. Without these the data has to be considered with caution.

The ability to then test the results of where you have spent your and your partners’ time and money on making changes to the town centre, whether it be different types of events, improving public realm, increased signage or the basics of improving the cleanliness and feeling of personal safety, is crucial. What is success? How effective have your efforts been? To answer those questions you need data at a granular level you can trust. This is the approach we’ve been developing through our BT Insights and pfbb UK analysis work, combining an understanding of how people use places with a framework to prioritise what will make the most difference.

Good place management is about focusing on what makes the biggest difference. Having a good framework to determine priorities and reliable data to inform decisions and measure success are fundamental to be able to achieve this.

I look forward to supporting the IPM review of the 25 Factors framework and to discussing this further at the ATCM Conference, including exploring what the future priorities will need to be for our towns and high streets to thrive.