Experiences from the Community Insight user group

Event date: Friday 8th March

A big thank you to all those (Affinity Sutton, Circle Housing Group, Devon and Cornwall Homes, One Housing Group, Orchard, Peabody, Sovereign, Symphony and Tower Hamlets) who came to our first Community Insight user group meet last Friday, and the many others who fed in comments for the event.

It was great to meet with everyone, and have so many users involved in the development of Community Insight over the coming months. The event was a great opportunity to share experiences of using Community Insight so far, and explore how to improve the tool to make it a critical part of targeting and evaluating community investment in your organisations.

Below we have put together a round-up of what went on, and what you can expect from Community Insight over the coming months.

How are you using Community Insight?

Critically, Community Insight is being used to support and evidence the community investment decisions being made by housing providers.

Organisations were using Community Insight to identify changes within their neighbourhood and quickly pull up reports to show and share this information.

Users found that they could quickly break down census data without having to trawl through public sites to find the data, saving time and money.

Importantly, users were able to paint a picture of the ‘external factors and drivers’ within their neighbourhoods and communities.

How has your organisation been using Community Insight? Get in touch here if you have any comments.

What next?

A big focus of the first user group meet-up was to establish what users wanted to get out of the tool. The key functionality that users identified were:

Report on areas without stock: Generate data and report on any area by drawing on the map, not just for those areas where people have stock.

Different stock types: Customise property types (general needs, supported housing, etc.), and turn on/off different types on the map and reports.

Neighbourhood dashboard: Explore and compare data for all stock and neighbourhoods. Select which key indicators you would like to view, and how you would like the data to displayed in order to get the best results.

New functionality will be rolled out every two weeks, and all of the above is in development. So if you don’t see it in the next update (due 15th March), you can expect the new functionality to be rolled out over the coming months. Keep an eye on this blog for changes.

And as always, any feedback or comments? Get in touch!