Paint the town red by building trust in data

Matt Culpin, Product Director at IEG4, a digital transformation organisation, has claimed the way to improve isolated neighbourhoods is by building trust in data. Mr Culpin guides us through how local authorities can secure personalised data from locals, helping to create an ideal living environment.

You may have already heard of the concept of the 15-minute neighbourhoods, sometimes referred to as 20-minute cities of places. For those of you that haven’t, it is the transformation of urban spaces that provides residents access to most, if not all, of their needs within a short walk or bike ride from their home.

However, although this is not a new idea – it can be attributed to American urban planner, Clarence Perry, who coined the phrase ‘a walkable neighbourhood’ in 1929 – the concept should be used to breathe life back into areas across the UK.

The last few years have revealed weaknesses in urban planning, particularly with the restricted radius of movement caused by the pandemic, highlighting the increased importance of the quality of our neighbourhoods. An example of this includes a report which was published by The Red Cross charity and the Co-op which found nine millions Britons who live in rural areas identify themselves as always or often lonely – accounting for almost one fifth of the population.

In addition, the most recent statistics released by the government in July 2021, displayed that people aged 50 and over were more likely to feel lonely than younger people and individuals who suffered with a disability were the most impacted. This suggests that more needs to be done – especially for people with a limiting long-term illness or disability – to ensure people have the best access to obtaining a good quality of life.

The introduction of 15-minute neighbourhoods, which ultimately attempt to create a more environmentally friendly, socially inclusive development, is just one of the ways we could improve our local communities with the use of data and personalisation. If we have any hope of creating a better citizen experience, we need to understand the whole picture of how they use their neighbourhood, how they move, and how we can personalise their services to improve this.

It is inevitable we will data, but, understandably, the public are sceptical of their data being tracked. So, for this to work, councils need to start building trust in how we collect and use data.

How personalisation works 

Councils hold a wealth of information within graphical information systems or GIS, internal databases, spreadsheets, and lots of unstructured data.

For example, take Susan. Through the way she uses the council website, we know that her interests are activities for children and healthy living. In other words, she likes to keep fit and is a regular user of a local leisure centre.

We also know that she cares about the environment as she is signed up to receive email bulletins from the council about these subjects. When we view her personalised homepage, we can see the main navigation is about schools and nurseries, sports, and leisure.

Through this we can understand more about Susan and how to make her citizen experience much better. We can use this understanding to highlight events she might be interested in and services she is more likely to use. We can also send her information via newsletters on topics she cares about and are relevant to her.

Data security and management

However, for a truly personalised experience to work, you need to build trust and transparency first – customers expect their data to remain private and secure, but at the same time, they desire a personalised and contextualised experience.

Data ethics are important to consider as part of this. The tension between personalised experiences and privacy is increasing. A data driven approach to designing personalised experiences benefits the customer and the organisation, but if something goes wrong, it risks violating the customer’s trust, thus it is imperative to be cautious about how you use and manage customer data.

Ways to remain wary include being explicit with consent management and preference settings to give customers better control over how their data is used and delineate the settings by functional area. For example, marketing preferences are not used in face-to-face or telephone transactions.

As well as prioritising consent management, consider transparency and privacy settings so that customers know why and how you intend to use and manage their personal information. Communicate proactively about preference and consent and how it can improve your service offering.

Additionally, make ethics a core component of your data management strategy by creating data use cases based on the value or benefit brought to the customer, not just the organisation.

Painting a picture with data

Today, citizens are selective in the information and services they choose to trust. A council’s website is one of those trusted services, and if we are going to create new and innovative communities, data is our greatest tool.

By following these guidelines, councils who are planning to start implementing personalisation can begin to ethically monitor the behaviour of their users and improve their most used services as a result.

Citizen engagement platforms play a key role in this, and one that enables councils to surface data about a citizen to that citizen via a single account login on the council website is preferable. It is tools like these that give citizens a single view of the data a council holds about them, meaning they know exactly how their data is used – promoting transparency and putting citizens first.

Images: John Reed and geralt