Hopeful Towns: BID-BUILDER

HOW TO USE THE LOCAL DATA

The aim of the LSOA data in the Local Data Library is to demonstrate existing knowledge of the areas of most acute need within your authority. This shows an underlying methodology for a given project, based on data and insights.

Such information will, in most instances, be already held within the council. But if you are turning a bid around quickly then it can be useful to have it handy, and to be able to visualise your insights at short notice.

One way to use the datasets we have provided - as well as others like them - is simply to describe the findings. For example, if you were looking at Educational Deprivation in Wrexham, using the WIMD deprivation dataset, you might order all 1,909 Welsh LSOAs from the highest Educational Deprivation score to the lowest. 8 Wrexham LSOAs fall into the 100 highest scoring, and you could simply write that "8 of our 85 neighbourhoods are among the 100 most educationally deprived communities in Wales".

Alternatively, you might want to make a map, visualising the data for the area alongside some additional commentary. The example map above shows the concentrations of Educational Deprivation across LSOAs in Wrexham.

If you do not have a mapping tool in-house then a map like this can be made relatively quickly, using Excel 3D mapping. Steps for doing this are as follows:

Click this link to download LSOA shape files
Create a new spreadsheet with just the LSOA codes from your authority and the data for each one that you want to map - make sure you include column headings
Use 'Control A' to select the data, go to 'Insert', choose '3D maps' and open in 3D maps, and a new tab will open
For location, choose the column header for the list of LSOA codes, then choose 'Custom Region (.kml, .shp) from the drop-down menu
Go to your downloads and selectthe most recent document: Lower_Layer_Super_Output_Areas_December_2011_Generalised_Clipped__Boundaries_in_England_and_Wales
It will take a few minutes to import, and when it has done select 'lsoa11cd' on the drop-down menu and then click 'import'
The area will now appear on the map; choose 'Change the visualisation to region' icon on the layer pane, so that the LSOAs show up as areas not dots
In the 'values' box select the column header of the data you want to map (e.g. Educational Deprivation)
This will then map your data for you; you can amend colour and shading on the layer pane, and do things like add street names using the 'Map labels' button at the top
Once you are happy click 'capture screen' and paste the map into your bid (tip: you can sometimes get a better image quality if you click 'create video' and then take a screen grab of the resulting image)

You can look at the data behind the example chart above by clicking here.