In measuring what matters, place managers need access to great data sets to maintain visibility on the places they plan, create and manage. There are three ways to think about the type of data that is most powerful in guiding place-based decisions:
- Community Voice - what do locals love?
- Behavioural Data - where do people spend time?
- Australia wide - can I easily access and compare locations?
With a deep background in place management, our team have carefully developed a data system which is the ‘best of all worlds’.
Here’s a breakdown of how to think about the types of data you need, and how to utilise our tools alongside others.
1. Community Voice
What the community say and feel is often the critical starting point in place measurement. There are a number of great tools available that provide a digital interface to solicit input from the local community. Online surveys or feedback systems can be valuable in learning about contemporary issues across a specific area.
Some limitations of community voice data:
Soliciting feedback can mean the data results can be hard to scale across large areas, compare over time, or benchmark to other locations. Be careful to choose a method that enables you to ‘repeat’ the approach in the future.
Our approach:
Rather than soliciting feedback, our lifestyle values data sets tap into what local people are saying and doing to provide insight into local lifestyle trends. For example, if you’re trying to understand the lifestyle of Healesville in the Yarra Valley, you could survey townspeople and visitors and ask them about their experience. But the Neighbourlytics tools instead harness what people are posting about online, and how they describe their experiences in ratings and reviews. This method makes it fast and easy to capture data across large areas, as well as track change over time.
Many Neighbourlytics users pair our lifestyle data sets with other feedback tools, using our data tools to provide context, and then run targeted surveys or other specialised research on specific topics of trends that emerge.
2. Geofenced behavioural data
In the last few years there has been a huge influx of behavioural data sets based on mobile phone movement information. There are two broad types of mobile phone movement data - app pings, or sim card (aka ‘telco’) data. Although the types vary widely in cost, ampleness and velocity, both are excellent sources of intel into how people move around. Due to their size and instability, these data sets are notoriously difficult to handle, and so there are a number of very experienced teams now offering analytics services to help you utilise these data sets.
Some limitations of behavioural data services:
The difficulty in handling this data means it is typically provided ‘by request’. This can make it an expensive and sometimes slow process to receive bespoke insights for your location.
Our approach:
For the last 6 years, Neighbourlytics provided customised analysis for our users’. However with that much experience under our belts, we were able to hugely optimise our processes, and create the world’s first nation-wide behavioural data set published monthly.
While we no longer offer the flexibility of customised analysis, what you do get is powerful behavioural data for anywhere, available on all our accounts (even Starter - the free one!)
Our users typically use our behavioural data tools to track neighbourhood and regional change month on month. The learnings then inform how they might deploy more targeted movement tracking systems - such as pedestrian counters or IOT sensors.
3. Instantly available Australia-wide
The value of nationwide data sets is unquestionable. Many of the core tools you use everyday - aerial photos, demographics, planning codes, property information - are valuable because they are ubiquitous and accessible. Without much time or effort (and often without cost) you can access consistent information for any location, making these tools a regular “must see” for your site.
Some limitations of Australia-wide data sets:
The complexity of creating consistent data across the country can mean that - although valuable - these data sets can be fairly static, and risk becoming outdated. It’s important to consider how ‘aged’ data may impact the decisions you are making.
Our approach:
We’ve worked hard to optimise our data processing system to provide access to nationwide data, every month. While - needless to say - this is a huge quantity of data to be handled (10 million unique mobile devices every month!) our simple user interface, and tiered access levels make it as convenient to access our lifestyle data, as to look up an aerial photo.
Our users will commonly use our data sets alongside other nationwide data. Check out the Archistar platform, where users can turn on our activity hotspots data directly in the Archistar platform, to utilise this monthly behavioural information alongside Archistar’s powerful property and land tools.