How to make ward profile reports quickly and easily

You don’t need to spend hours making ward profile reports.

If you work with local data, you know that data collection and processing can swallow up your time – finding the right datasets, processing the data, aggregating to the right geographies, creating visualisations, and pulling everything together into a clear, professional report.

With Local Insight you can have a comprehensive ward profile report, customised to your needs, in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea.

Here’s how quick and easy it is.

Set up your wards in just a few clicks

Start by setting up your wards as custom areas in Local Insight. It takes only a few clicks, and once it’s done, you can reuse the areas time and time again.

Choose your report type

Within Local Insight you can choose from two different report options:

• Summary Reports: Headline statistics across key socio-economic themes (this is the most commonly used report type in Local Insight)
• Custom Report: Select from a list of 25 prebuilt themes. Select all themes for a comprehensive and detailed report or pick a handful for a more tailored report aligned to your strategic priorities.

View a sample Summary Report, Full Custom Report and Tailored Custom Report here.

Select your benchmark areas

For each report, you can choose two comparator areas that will be used throughout your report. You can select from:

• National comparator (Available for England, Wales and Scotland)
• Region (Available for England only)
• County (Available for England only)
• Local Authority (Available for England, Wales and Scotland)
• Any of your existing custom areas (Available for England, Wales and Scotland)

Start using your report

And that’s it! Your report is ready and instantly available to view online as an interactive report and download in MS Word format. Save it to your favourites so you can come back to it again later.

Share insights

Now it’s time to get the data into the hands of your colleagues and partners.

Share your interactive report internally

Instantly share a link to the interactive HTML report with other Local Insight users in your organisation.

Share your interactive report publicly

Want to make insights available more widely? With the Public Site add-on, you can publish selected reports online and share direct links with anyone — from councillors to local community partners.

See how Sheffield Council are making use of interactive ward profiles

Share your MS Word report

Do you prefer to distribute reports as documents? Use the downloaded report for easy sharing – ideal for Member briefings or your organisation’s website.

See how Shropshire Council are making use of Local Insight reports to deliver area profiles for a range of geographies.

“Local Insight Area Profile Reports are so easy to create and have saved us a lot of work. It’s great to have the data up to date and in one place. If we didn’t have Local Insight we wouldn’t have time to create these reports at our bespoke geographies to support our partners.”   

Julie Pugh, Insights & Research Analyst, Shropshire Council.

Always up to date

Another big bonus of Local Insight reports: they update automatically with the latest available data, so you don’t need to manually repeat the same steps. You’ll always have current and reliable information at your fingertips, saving you hours of time. 

Book a demo and build reports yourself

Local Insight brings together more than 1500 local level datasets in one place, ready for you to explore through interactive maps, reports and dashboards. 

Book a demo and get a two week free trial to find out how Local Insight can save you time and resources on your data reporting. 

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