Newsletter, June 2018 No Images? Click here Hi there, In this month's newsletter, you can find
Finding the right metrics and including your own in reportsChoosing the right data for your analysis or reports isn't always easy, especially with more than 8,000 types of metric to choose from. Some have been discontinued and replaced by others; not all apply for all geographies; some are published more frequently than others. My Local Metrics lets you simply define metric types, upload values yourself and choose who can view them. You can then include your local data in LG Inform and LG Inform Plus reports alongside metrics maintained by the LGA. Use the search tool to find metrics in LG Inform Plus for your required area type, such as ward. Ask the Support team if you need help, and tell us if you know a metric is available nationally and want us to consider adding it. If you have the data, you can use My Local metrics to add it yourself. Data maturity tool now available to everyoneOur new Data Maturity self-assessment tool was launched by the LGA’s Tim Adams at the Nesta City Data Conference on 24th May 2018. The tool asks you to assess your organisation in terms of data use, culture, management, skills and governance. Responses are rated to give a score in each area, which can be compared with averages within your organisation and, for councils, with other councils within the same type or area. Along with results, the Data Maturity tool suggests ways to advance, gives best practice, cites case studies and links to additional resources. New ward boundaries now availableBefore the local elections on 3rd May 2018, we added new wards to Natural Neighbourhoods as “pre-operative wards”. These wards are now operative and have been loaded into LG Inform Plus as official wards, so you can report on them in the same way as for other wards. Amongst the cities with new wards are Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle. We mark old pre-operative wards as “replaced by” the official wards and don’t delete them, so reports you’ve written for pre-operative wards will still work. LG Inform Benchmarking club – 2017-18 Q4Over the past two year, our Benchmarking Club had great success with over 160 councils participating. The Q4 2017/18 results are now live in LG Inform and available to view through a custom summary report here: click here to access the report. The most recent data is only available to registered local authority users of LG Inform, so please sign in to view the report. You can also view our newly added benchmarking street cleansing metrics report 2017/18 here. The club started with metrics covering waste collection, sickness absence and complaints, and in response to user demand has since grown to include fly tipping, website visitor statistics and, more recently, street cleansing metrics. We are always interested in adding new indicators to the club. If you have a new indicator you would be interested in us adding, please visit the Knowledge Hub group (sign in is required). This is a strictly voluntary process and we will be sending out links for Q1 2018/19 collection in the second week in July. If your authority doesn’t already upload data and you would now like to, please let the LG Inform team know. LG Inform Fire Benchmarking club – 2017-18 Q4We are pleased to let you know that the LG Inform Fire Benchmarking Club Q4 data has now been added to LG Inform and the reports updated. You can download the most recent report here. The report allows you to change the comparison group used to focus the report on a regional group, metropolitan, combined or county group or Family Group 4 comparison group. If you know of anyone else who would be interested in taking part, please pass on this article or have them contact lginform@local.gov.uk and we can send them more information; the more users we have, the better the club is for all. We are working on a companion report for the benchmarking club which will contain a series of heat maps covering each of the metrics in the main report. If you have any other requests either in terms of reports or additional metrics, please do let us know. Please note that on the 10th May, Home Office published a number of updates which you may also be interested in. Where these overlap with the benchmarking club, the official statistics are used in place of any locally submitted data. Date for your calendarQ1 2018/19 - collection window opens 2 July 2018 and closes 3 August 2018 New Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 2015 reportThe Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) has been a key resource frequently used by local authorities to understand and manage their area. To help further, we have recently drafted a new report looking at different aspects of the IMD 2015 figures. This complements our first local authority report for IMD 2015. The original 2015 report looked at the ‘average score’ measure, whilst this new one summarises other local authority measures of deprivation, including:
You can see the new report on LG Inform here. Training and eventsAre you interested in learning more about LG Inform or LG Inform Plus? If so, why not sign up for our online training sessions? They're quick, informative and easily accessible from the comfort of your own desk. You will be sent a phone number to join a conference call and a URL to let you view our computer screen, then one of our experienced data analysts will run through the site live and show you how it works in practise. Find out about upcoming online training sessions here, or click on any subject name to download a PDF guide. Email lginform@local.gov.uk to sign up for any of the available sessions. If you want help getting started with our developer tools and the Application Programmer Interface (API) we can offer one-to-one sessions. Just tell us what you want to know about, when’s good for you and if you want to communicate via Google Hangout, Skype, phone or another channel. Alternatively, you can book your place on one of our popular training days using the links below. You can learn what's available, how to use the tools, and ask us any questions you may have.
We are always happy to visit councils to provide our training sessions. If your council would be interested in hosting an event, please contact us at lginform@local.gov.uk As ever, we're always interested to hear your ideas for improving our services and would love to hear from you, so don't hesitate to get in touch by replying to this newsletter. |