Data used
- Historic youth homelessness data
- Unemployment data
- Educational attainment and Truancy data
- Mental Health and Hospital Admissions data
- Children in care data
Scenario
CenterPoint is a well-known charity in the UK that looks to help the young and homeless. They are currently facing a major challenge, UK austerity cuts have had the inadvertent consequence that the quality and coverage of homelessness reporting has dropped significantly over the past five years. The problem has now become hidden, as over 35% of local authorities are not reporting the scale of youth homelessness in their area.
To address this issue a two part strategy was developed.
- A public interactive map was created that in clear visual terms allows the general public to dynamically interact with the data and gain greater insight and understanding of the problem
- Exporting data into a press release format for each local area. This allows the data to be presented as a narrative. Each Member of Parliament was sent a PDF report for their constituency, greatly helping Centrepoint engage with politicians.
This application and the accompanying reports have been the subject of a national publicity campaign and the underlying data reports have been sent local authority by local authority to the relevant politicians and campaigners.
The raw data on homelessness has been enhanced with critical risk factors such as poverty, education attainment, truancy etc. so that the data can be used not only to report on the situation but to generate the key insight that help interested parties navigate their way to effective solutions.
Outcome
Working with CentrePoint we were able to deploy our secure Open City Data platform and visualisation tools to highlight the issues which mattered most to them in a clear visual way.
Nquiringminds’ Open City Data Platform generated hundreds of local briefing reports that were sent to activists and every MP in England
Immediate impact was seen with almost all Councils data being reported in the last quarter. This demonstrates the importance of using open data or risk losing it.
Reporting of homeless had an immediate uplift post the campaign, proving the effectiveness of well place data visualisation