Link Group is one of the largest social landlords in Scotland, operating across 23 local authority areas and serving more than 15,000 customers.
Link has embedded Local Insight within its work, and provides a single, trusted way to see where their homes are and how need varies by place.
We spoke to Sheila Maxwell, Social Value Co-ordinator at Link Group, who explained the impact the platform has had on their work, and the efforts she’s undertaken to encourage organisation-wide use of the platform.
Before Local Insight, Link would rely on neighbourhood evidence from multiple sources, and often would lean on anecdotal evidence, which could be unreliable and offered a limited view of the challenges an area faced.
Link needed to:
However, with stock spread from the central belt to very remote locations, just seeing everything on one reliable map was challenging. As Sheila explained to us: “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
As early adopters of both the now-retired Community Insight platform and Local Insight, Link’s needs helped to shape the platform, and in turn, Local Insight became an important part of their work.
From the start, the platform offered a way everyone – from board members to frontline staff – could view an interactive map of all Link stock types in one place for the first time.
Staff could then view this stock alongside trusted national indicators, displayed at Scotland’s small area levels, known as Data Zones and Intermediate Zones.
This gave them an overview of the areas they work in. To dig deeper, Link could then generate dashboards and area profile reports of their stock groups and neighbourhoods in minutes.
During our conversation with Sheila, she explained how the platform’s use, from “funding applications and tender submissions to evidencing need” has “been instrumental in securing millions of pounds of investment in services for Link communities.”
“The platform and its data has enabled us to create, expand and sustain services in advice, employability, wellbeing and support and care.”
“And, we’ve saved staff time, with hundreds of national datasets accessible in one place, we reduced the need to independently source relevant, reliable datasets for funding applications and tender submissions ourselves.”
As costs rise and budgets come under strain, Link has focused on data insight and intelligence to maximise use and targeting of resources in line with the needs and issues of both customers and the broader community.
For example, the ‘Link in the Community Fund’ provides targeted support to community groups operating in areas most in need. To enable this, Link evaluates locations according to thematic need, as identified by the choropleth indicator maps within the platform.
In another recent project, Local Insight evidence demonstrated the need for Link to operate beyond their usual area by showing, at neighbourhood level, the need for a Money and Wellbeing Service was higher in North Ayrshire than in other parts of the central belt where they had historically delivered.
The team built a simple dashboard, combining indicators for unsecured personal debt, Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claims related to mental health and unemployment, and used the data to inform Link’s Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB) funding bid. Based on the strength of Local Insight data, the organisation realised the need to target the service at tenants in specific communities where the need and potential demand for a Money and Wellbeing Service was greatest including North Ayrshire.
As Sheila put it: “we knew there was a strong relationship between wellbeing and debt, so we used Local Insight to look at indicators such as personal unsecured debt and people who were unemployed due to mental health issues, and that evidence was then used to made the case to SLAB to fund the targeted service.”
Sheila has been a champion for the platform, ensuring her colleagues at all levels understand the positive impact the platform can have – resulting in over two thousand logins from staff since the original Community Insight was launched in 2015.
The company’s intranet (Linkipedia) has a dedicated landing page that introduces the platform and explains how to use Local Insight.
Alongside this, Sheila will welcome new users to the platform herself with an email, offering bespoke tips on how to use the platform and explaining how their stock is represented.
This is combined with regular demos with colleagues, and videos created to highlight potential business applications of the platform.
Looking to explore the data for Scotland, or see how Local Insight can help housing associations to visualise stock groups and better understand their patch?
Book a demo today and receive a two-week free trial.
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