Community Insight celebrates nomination for Open Data Institute Innovation awards with special pricing for smaller housing organisations

Over recent months Community InsightHACT and OCSI’s  lightweight web-based open data mapping tool – has provided increasing numbers of housing providers with quick, easy to use and affordable access to the wide range of open data now available on their neighbourhoods and communities.

Over 70 housing providers – with some 1.3m homes in management – now subscribe to Community Insight (and an increasing number to Value Insight, its social value mapping and analytics companion application).  This makes it one of the most used socially focused business application currently on the market – something that has been recognised by the Open Data Institute who have shortlisted Community Insight for the 2014 Open Data Institute Awards in the Innovation category.

In the two years since its launch, HACT and OCSI have worked closely with housing providers to develop Community Insight’s functionality and ensure it meets the day to day needs of housing practitioners working in communities.  Recent feature additions have included:

  •  a new and expanded set of data indicators
  • some great neighbourhood-focused infographics on our new “dashboard” feature
  •  the ability to find out which other housing providers are developing in your surrounding neighbourhoods
  •  instant neighbourhood profile report generation
  •   user-definable comparators to other neighbourhoods, local areas or national averages for all data
  •  hotspot identification and mapping
  •    “upload your own data” – the ability to map up to 10 of your own internal data fields on a neighbourhood basis

To celebrate our shortlisting for the ODI award, we’re making Community Insight available to even more housing providers, by reducing the cost to smaller providers who might not – to date – have been able to afford a subscription.  For the remainder of 2014, housing providers with less than 1000 homes in ownership or management can now subscribe to Community Insight for only £1000 per year and those with less than 2500 homes can subscribe for only £2500 a year.

If you’re interested in finding out more, email info@hact.org.uk or call 0207 250 8502.

New feature for Community Insight: Define your own comparators

 
This week, the Community Insight User Group met once again at HACT’s offices in London. It was a really fruitful afternoon and offered opportunities to hear how various organisations are using Community Insight to inform their decisions, as well as setting out some of the exciting future developments to Community Insight.
 

For those of you that were not able to attend, we also spent part of the afternoon running through a few demos of new features that have been implemented since the last user group. This included a demo of our most recent update to Community Insight, ‘Define your own comparators’. This feature enables you to choose which comparators are used within the reports. Previously, this was set as two standard comparators; England and Social Housing.
 

Now, you are able to define your own comparators in order to benchmark against any areas in the profile report. The Administrator for your group can access this through the ‘Admin’ tab and ‘Manage Organisation’. Please note, currently the comparators that you choose will apply to all your stock groups.
 

You can choose from national and regional comparators, counties, local authorities and your own stock groups – the Social Housing option is also still there if you would like to continue using it!
 

We also went through demos of the following features; If you are unsure of how to use any of these features; please get in touch and we would be happy to walk you through it.

– Upload Your Data

– Filter on dashboard for matrix and chart

– Export matrix and charts from dashboard to CSV file

– How areas are defined for stock groups

– Download your stock for a particular stock group

– Scale bar added to map.