Community Lens: A tool to learn about the needs of England’s communities

By Shruti Grover, Design Research Lead at Hetco Design Ltd

In April 2021, we at Hetco were commissioned by Catalyst to lead a five-week rapid research project to develop a new prototype tool to support the social sector to derive value from mapping their datasets. We spoke to a number of UK-based organisations to better understand the current mapping tools used, organised the tools and came up with three concepts for new tools. We have now built one of these concepts and spent the last week learning from charities about how they would use this new tool.

Meet Community Lens, an open-source tool that can help match open data sets to the areas you work in, to help you learn more about the needs of local communities. You can use this tool to directly inform your service delivery, and help funders and strategic partners understand your communities better.

Currently, Community Lens only contains the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 2019 data set for England. Based on the feedback we’ve received so far, we’ve created a suggested roadmap of what datasets and features could be added in the future. You can also visit the Lens and fill out a form to request further data sets or features.

How to use Community Lens

Using Community Lens is easy! All you need to do is

1) Organise a list of the postcodes you want to know more about. These could be locations of members, beneficiaries, volunteers, service points or operational assets

2) Enter this list to view using the lens of the IMD 2019 (Income, Educational Attainment, Health and Disability). 

The tool then generates intelligent sentences about how these postcodes are distributed according to IMD Deciles. It tells you what percentage of your postcodes are located in the best and worst performing areas of England. So if you are a food bank, you might learn that 90% of your food bank members are located in the 30% most deprived areas for Income, or 40% of your food bank locations are located in the 60% most deprived areas for Health and Disability. You can then use this information to advise a funder, or change your strategy. 

We spoke to nine organisations to better understand how they would use the tool. Below are four selected case studies that best illustrate how it can be used with two key areas of focus: to inform service delivery and provide strategic insight. 

Informing Service Delivery

According to James Bowles, the most widely observed use of geospatial data by charities is to directly inform current and/or future service delivery. Two examples of how the community lens tool can be used for this come from the Harpur Trust, and Voluntary Arts.

Harpur Trust

“A possible project could be to understand if we are awarding bursaries to students in the most deprived areas/ lowest income”

Harpur Trust is a charity founded over 450 years ago, that provides individual support and access to learning programmes in Bedford. Staff members Sarah and Heather used the IMD tool to look at the postcode data of families who have children at one of their independent schools. Going forward, they intend to use the tool for their education projects: to match grants to the highest priority students (according to IMD); identify schools in the most deprived areas to help aid allocation of laptops to schools; and for their COVID Catch up programme, which helps identify schools in the most deprived areas and match them up with the closest trainee teachers. 

The tool in use by Harpur Trust, comparing their data to the Income Deprivation Lens

Voluntary Arts

“We understand the racial diversity of our members and events, but do not have a clear picture of the social demographics.”

Voluntary Arts supports and promotes creative participation for everyone in the UK and Ireland. 

They are interested in better understanding how engagement in the arts varies across the countries. They analysed the event location dataset of the Get Creative festival –  an annual festival with around 1,700 interactive arts events across the UK – using the Community Lens tool. 

Analysing available postcode data from in England in 2019 (a total of 663 festival events) they have learnt that the majority of the locations (61%) are in the bottom half of areas in England across the seven domains of relative deprivation – i.e Income, Employment, Education, Skills and Training, Health Disability, Crime, Barriers to Housing and Services and Living Environment. Going forward they would like to try to target more areas in the lower deciles to ensure improved reach of the festival in areas which currently have least engagement in the arts.

The tool in use by Voluntary Arts showing which Decile in the IMD participants fall into

Strategic Insight

According to James Bowles, geospatial data is used to engage stakeholders for financial purposes, such as demonstrating demand or impact in grant applications, or using geodemographic classifications to target fundraising appeals. Two examples of how the community lens tool can be used to engage stakeholders come from the Healthy Living Platform and Croydon Voluntary Action.

Healthy Living Platform

“Whilst we know that Lambeth has areas that have deprived social economics, we did not have access to reporting that would verify our assumptions, as well as provide exact statistics.”

The Healthy Living Platform is a Lambeth-based organisation that enables families to eat healthily, socialise, and be physically active, through regular sessions and one-off activities. From using the tool, they learnt that almost 90% of their members are in the bottom 50% of areas in England for Income, and 75% of them are in the bottom 50% of areas in England for Health. They intend to use these statistics to support future funding applications, in order to continue their healthy lifestyle projects, as well as using them to support their education and training internally, and with partner organisations.

The tool in use by the Healthy Living Platform showing their beneficiaries against the Lens of Income Deprivation

Croydon Voluntary Action (CVA)

“This tool will help CVA and our partners to make the case for our  activities/services to be funded”

CVA promotes, supports and develops effective voluntary action, community development and community involvement by connecting volunteers to organisations and facilitating collaborations between organisations. They have been invited to prepare a Big Lottery funding bid to provide support for food insecurity in Croydon. As part of the bid they wanted to identify 4-6 food support organisations to partner with from the 50+ existing organisations in the area. Community Lens helped them understand that 78% of the full set of organisations were located in the bottom 30% of the IMD 2019. When looking at four potential partners, they learnt that three were in the bottom 20%. Using the tool, is helping them adopt a data-informed approach to the selection of the correct partner locations for the final bid.

CVA using the Lens of Multiple Deprivation to assess potential project partners

Going Forward

Based on our conversations with the charities, we have developed a roadmap to continue to improve the tool as and when funding becomes available. A popular request was to add a feature to enable comparison between two sets of postcodes:

“We were doing a catchup programme where we were looking at where the primary schools were located and the home addresses of the trainee teachers to help us match up the trainee teachers to the primary schools. The comparison feature would be very useful to help with this.” – Harpur Trust

You can contribute to this roadmap here

This project was funded by Catalyst as part of the Data Collective.