The last year has seen Community Insight become the most used new data analytic tool in the housing sector, with more than 50 housing providers with a total of 1m homes in management using it regularly access and analyse data on the communities that they work in. The size of that user community has allowed Community Insight to accelerate development of new features, enabling access to new data sets and new ways of presenting and interpreting data.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen the integration of data from www.police.uk, providing at a glance access to the latest crime stats for individual neighbourhoods; the introduction of the “My Patch” facility, which enables housing providers to find out instantly who else is working in or near their neighbourhoods; and the ability to capture and export Community Insight data into other systems (including in house GIS and mapping products); as well as a host of behind the scenes changes to make Community Insight even faster and more robust.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out more upgrades to what Community Insight can do.  Users can already get a preview of the new Neighbourhood Dashboard feature at our beta site http://beta.communityinsight.org and comment on our LinkedIn Group.

We’ll also see even more new data – integrating the live data feeds only recently made available from the Land Registry – and improvements to reporting, enabling the archiving of historic community profiles and the ability to “freeze frame” data and analyse trends.

And – early in the new year – Community Insight subscribers will have an exclusive first opportunity to beta test our new social impact mapping tool, Value Insight, a partner application to Community Insight, which will enable housing providers to map and analyse the social impact of their community investment activities, drawing on exclusive wellbeing valuation metrics from leading social value expert Daniel Fujiwara, working in partnership with HACT.

It’s an exciting time for Community Insight – if you’re a subscriber, get involved in the conversations around where we go next on our LinkedIn user group or come along to our active user group events (the next one is on 19 November); if you’d like to find out more about how Community Insight can make a difference to your work, register for a free demonstration and trial account here.

For housing providers operating across multiple areas, getting information on who is working in your neighbourhoods can sometimes be a difficult and time consuming task. And when looking to move into new neighbourhoods, it can be helpful to find out first who else is active in that area. Perhaps you want to work with other organisations on joint projects to address the needs of a neighbourhood. Or maybe to ensure you are not duplicating services. Or perhaps you have some stock that you want to rationalise, and you want to get an idea of who is already active in that area and might be interested in taking it on.

We are therefore very excited to announce the launch of the new ‘My Patch’ functionality in Community Insight. This tool allows Community Insight subscribers to instantly get a read out of all the other housing providers are active in each of your neighbourhoods. All users can now access a “My Patch tab on their Community Insight account, where they will find all of their stock groups listed. By picking any of your areas you will get a list of every social landlord that has let at least one property in that area in the last five years.”

This functionality has been made possible by DCLG’s release to HACT of five years of CORE lettings data. We are very grateful to the Department for making this powerful information available as open data; it will further enhance housing providers’ insight into the areas they work in, and hence the benefits they are able to deliver to those communities.

This is the first of several major feature upgrades being added to Community Insight this autumn, and these upgrades are included free in your subscription. If you do not yet use Community Insight, please contact us to arrange a demonstration, and find out how you can increase your knowledge of your neighbourhoods, and those working near you.

Behind the scenes in Community Insight, we’re always improving the system functionality and performance. Generally users notice the difference through new features such as stock types and hotspot mapping. Or we notice the difference in terms of it being easier to do things like update the data or launch a new version of Insight for housing providers in Wales.

We also release continual performance enhancements, which can really improve the user experience, such as faster loading of maps and and property assets (even on IE7 and IE8 …). Based on user-feedback, updating the postcode look-up data is one of those performance improvements that users really notice. Which is why we’re excited to have just updated and strengthened the postcode data we hold in the system.

Postcode data is now published on a quarterly basis by Ordnance Survey as open data, and we are always rolling-in the latest version of this information to ensure that we know about the addresses used by housing organisations. This data is linked to a coordinate (based on the centre of the postcode – unfortunately OS decided the postcode boundary was too valuable to publish as open data), which we use for locating property assets on the map. We can also take in property locations based on latitude-longitude (or easting-northing) which we we will roll into a future release.

Based on the postcode location, we can also identify which standard areas each postcode is in – such as wards, Output Areas, Super Output Areas, Local Authorities etc – and use this to generate community profile reports for Insight users. For this, we use lookup tables published by the Office for National Statistics. But we now also top this up with some GIS jujitsu to match previously unmatched postcode centres to the standard area boundary definitions.

The bottom-line is that our postcode matching is getting close to the magic 100%, with users able to map their properties in less than 1 minute. And as a bonus, Community Insight can also help organisations to identify errors in their underlying property postcode data – as we know some users are already doing.

In this week’s update we are mainly gearing up for the release of the ‘different stock types’ functionality, which was the most requested feature at the user group in March. But we’ve also found time to go-live with a useful new feature where you can now download your property data by stock group, as well as the usual tweaks and tidies.

Downloading your property data by group : Many users have wanted to be able to download their stock by group, to make it easier to edit the groups separately. You can now do this directly – look for the link under ‘Edit stock groups’ to quickly download your properties (both postcodes and unique reference numbers) for viewing and editing. If you want to edit the actual properties in each group, you can now download, edit and upload in a couple of minutes.

Testing the ‘Different stock types’ feature: The most-requested feature from users at the user-group session in March was to allow different types of property type (General Needs, Shared Ownership, Supported Housing and so on), and for users to be able to create their own types. This is now running on the testing server, with a few early users having a go at the functionality before it goes live. We are aiming to have the full feature live in the next couple of weeks, meaning that users can even better tailor Community Insight to their organisation.

Tweaks and tidies: We have made Community Insight even more secure, moving the user features onto a secure platform to avoid ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks and other exotically named hacks. And we have been busy under the Community Insight bonnet making sure that the tool always runs as smoothly as possible, including optimisations for Internet Explorer 10.

And as always, check back regularly to see what is new, and do get in touch with any comments or feedback.