Making it Count
The Towns Fund Delivery Partner is sharing blog posts the week of August 3 – 7 covering lessons learnt from our work with Cohort 1 towns who submitted their Town Investment Plans on 31 July. This post covers some lessons from our work on Data Services.
“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”
While the exact origin of this quote is subject to some debate, with many attributing it to Albert Einstein, it is a useful mantra to hold in mind when developing your Town Investment Plan (TIP).
Data – and the things that can be counted – rightly play a vital role in setting the context for the Town, it is a core part of establishing the evidence base for investment. Used well, data can provide robust foundations on which the whole investment plan can be built. However, the temptation can be to use data for data’s-sake. To use multiple indicators, with limited structure or narrative, as a means of trying to provide comfort to the reader that the TIP is evidenced based. The risk with this approach is that it often has the opposite effect, so rather than provide assurance it creates confusion.
To avoid falling into this trap, here are three questions to ask yourself (or for the Town Board to ask) as you are preparing your TIP:
1) Is the analysis focused specifically on the Town?
Or is it talking more about the local authority area as a whole?
To do this will require granular analysis. It will require use of those indicators and data sets that are available at lower geographical levels. And where national statistics only provide data at the local authority level, it will require commentary or triangulation with other data sources to explain how a particular issue plays out within the Town.
It also points to the importance of locally specific and qualitative data in building the evidence base. Business surveys, community consultation, feedback from key stakeholder groups – to name only three – all have an important role to play in creating an evidence base that is directly relevant to the town.
2) Does the analysis identify genuine challenges and opportunities?
To do this well the data needs to be presented in a wider context. Two key sub-questions sit at the heart of this:
How does the Town compare to other places?; and
How have things been changing over time?
To answer the first will require comparison to regional or national averages, to other towns or cities or even to other places within the same local authority. It is this comparison that will enable strengths and weaknesses to be identified. While the second requires trend analysis: have things been getting worse, has the ‘gap’ been widening or is this an emerging opportunity that needs to be built on?
3) So what?
Is every datapoint and indicator included for a specific reason and to make a specific point?
It is important that the data used in the TIP helps to tell the Town story. That the challenges and opportunities identified through the data inform the vision and strategy and ultimately the projects proposed.
To do this well will require analysis and sifting of a broad range of data, but remember not all of that analysis needs to be included within the TIP. Be ruthless, ask the ‘so what’ question. Make sure that the data you use counts.