For Coalfields Regeneration Trust (CRT), reliable data is essential in identifying areas of economic deprivation, assessing funding eligibility, and ensuring resources are directed where they are needed most. With Local Insight, they can map deprivation and social value more effectively, using over 1,500 indicators covering key themes like health, education, and community needs.
CRT is a community wealth building charity that supports those in Britain’s former coalfield areas. They create jobs and drive economic growth by building units for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), then reinvesting the taxable profits into partnerships that help communities reach their potential.
To support this work, CRT has a Local Insight subscription with the Public Site add-on, enabling them, their stakeholders and their partners to easily access key community data.
Those who work with data will be very familiar with the process of finding, collecting and cleaning raw data worksheets – transforming them into a usable resource. It’s a time-consuming job, made more difficult by relying on fragmented and diverse sources, such as the ONS website and government portals.
When this work was finished, the team would then need to manually distribute information to stakeholders and community partners for funding bids and planning purposes – something that again took valuable time away from other work.
Raw data from Police UK – OCSI takes .csvs like this, one for each Police force for every month of the year, and turn it into a 12-month total of each offense type
As subscribers to Community Insight, the predecessor to Local Insight, CRT had a solution that allowed them to quickly and easily provide Reports for their Members, that contained all the data needed to assist with funding bids, or inform decision-making.
When Community Insight was retired – the team experimented with other tools, but found that they weren’t as easy to use, and didn’t offer the wide-range of data that they needed.
Looking for a suitable replacement, CRT came to OCSI following the launch of Local Insight 2.0.
Rebuilt from the ground up, Local Insight 2.0 was created using everything we’d learned from working on previous platforms, with a focus on creating a more seamless experience for users. This includes huge improvements to the user interface, a massive upgrade to reports, and new functionalities that have been requested for years.
Allison Carr, development manager at CRT, explained: “Once I’d had a chance to sit down with Local Insight, it was easy to pick-up and get going with.”
“When deciding on the funding eligibility of an area we heavily rely on things like the Index of Multiple Deprivation. If an area isn’t in the top 30% of deprived areas, we know that’s not an area we need to target – so having access to that is key for us. We also needed clear reports to share with our cohorts across Coalfields.”
“When we lost that, that was a real loss of service for our members. Local Insight was a clear, suitable replacement for us – and the amount of data exceeded expectations.”
The platform features over 1500 indicators across a range of different themes, including deprivation, community, health and education – offering far more than just the key themes that CRT were initially looking for.
Police UK total crime offenses displayed on the Local Insight map – after being processed by OCSI researchers
“We never really had the broad range of things in one accessible area before, and that’s a massive thing Local Insight brings to our work.”
Cait Sinnott, programme assistant for CRT Scotland, added: “With access to current social indexes not available through the national statistics office, we’re provided with greater insight into previously hidden barriers faced by our communities.”
Local Insight has since become a core tool for CRT, playing a key role in strategic projects.
More recently, the team focused on measuring and evidencing social value. As part of their new organisational strategy, which outlines five key missions and ten ambitions, CRT used Local Insight to break down each stage of this strategy with data-driven insights.
The platform provided the data to explain why each ambition was set, how progress could be measured, and used evidence base to support the planning process.
Allison highlighted: “The data has been key to the planning process. We’re using Local Insight data as evidence to show how our team has met needs, and improved social value.”
Coalfields have three Public Sites, one for England, Scotland and Wales respectively – allowing anyone to access selected data, areas and reports on a view-only basis without the need for login credentials. You can view an example of one of these reports at this link.
Allison shared a specific instance where this came in handy: “One of our members needed some very specific data on children’s health for a project. Local Insight allowed us to generate the report at the click of a button – previously, we couldn’t do that.”
“We don’t have to email members anymore; they can go straight to the Public Site for the data they need.”
If your organisation is looking for a data platform to streamline insights and empower decision making, get in touch today to learn how Local Insight can support you.
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