Future esd-toolkit focus will assist the business needs of local authorities beyond CSR07 (Comprehensive Spending Review). The recommendations emerging from recent reviews: LG White Paper emphasis on the citizen, Lyons Report "place shaping" and the Varney Report "citizen insight" suggests increasing reliance on citizen-centred service delivery. To achieve this councils have to understand a 360 degree view of their business: This includes an understanding of the services being delivered, who uses them, how they are delivered, the service delivery costs to councils and location of areas of the population that might be served better or more cheaply with improved customer experience.
A six month pilot involving 13 participating councils is underway to deploy demographic profiling against all services in the local government services list (LGSL), linked to the channels and volumes of citizen interaction, and the service costs against currently emerging charging models. Participants are benefiting from the development of business benchmarking data and evidence, inputs to new online analysis tools and software, events and meetings with presentations from leading local and central government and commercial experts and one to one consultancy assistance.
The outputs from this project – trends, business statistics and reports, lessons learned, guidance, free ward level demographic data and online analysis and engagement tools will be available free of charge to all esd-toolkit subscribing authorities from October 2007.
Since its inception soon after the start of the millennium. The esd-toolkit programme has grown from strength to strength in the support it receives from local authority practitioners who are able to use the tools and facilities to work together to share ideas, solve problems and develop best practice. The programme, in effect, connects people so that they can share resources, ideas and knowledge to the common good of local government improvement. The 2007 programme has seen a significant shift in focus by the programme from its legacy eGovernment successes to the newly emerging challenges arising from central government and described very effectively within reports such as Lyons, Varney and the 'Stronger and Prosperous Communities' White Paper of October 2006. In all these proposals, there is a strong emphasis on developing and delivering future services around the needs of our customers. Such focus on the citizen is highly possible and can be progressed with confidence if councils work together to pool expertise and resources and partner with the commercial sector which has relied upon demographic analysis for almost twenty years.
In its commitment to move esd-toolkit activity to post CSR07 (Comprehensive Spending Review) priorities, esd-toolkit is promoting a number of citizen-centric initiatives under the care of its local authority steering groups and wider community of local authority special interest and regional user groups. One such pilot that is now well underway is the Customer Profiling Project. This activity that started in April 2007 has developed in response to the next generation of business improvement priorities within the local government sector. Communities and Local Government agreed to sponsor the work (lead contact is Dr Peter Blair) in response to the focus given for “communities to have a bigger say in the issues that matter to them most (LG White Paper)” and emphasis being placed in the Lyons Report for “place shaping” and the Varney Report for “citizen insight”. With increasing focus on citizen-centred service delivery, it is important for local councils to understand demographic trends and citizen preferred interactions with their local authorities.
For the initial six month pilot that is due to report in late September 2007, a highly active and vigorous community has developed involving participating local authorities, commercial suppliers and support/guidance from CLG, Cabinet Office, Audit Commission, Local Government Association, Local e-Government Standards Body and IDeA – all under the watchful care of esd-toolkit project manager Sheila Apicella and Profiling Consultant Jacqui McNish. Funding for the pilot was achieved through a mix of CLG grant and sponsorships from the 13 initial pilot authorities that are summarised at the end of this article.
The project seeks to develop a process to understand council citizens better, along with the services that they use most frequently and their preferred channel of interaction with the council. Through linkage with other projects underway within the esd-toolkit arena such as the NWeGG/IPF local government services ‘Cost to Serve’ investigations, councils will be able to assess a 360 degree assessment of their business activities. This includes an understanding of how services are being delivered, who uses them, how they are delivered, how much they cost to be delivered and trends for areas of the population that are potentially being missed or ill served when better communications and informed changes to strategy are possible. Using well established demographic profiles, councils are able to analyse these important business metrics and build on the ability to improve the customer experience, whilst promoting efficiency gains through channel migration and improved take up of services on offer.
If local authorities are to meet the more demanding efficiency targets expected in the periods beyond the post comprehensive spending review CSR07, success is likely to be heavily dependant on channel migration – i.e. encouraging citizens to interact with their council through modern, more efficient communication means. This project seeks to inform councils more about their citizen profiles to identify scope for channel migration and the messages to which they are most likely to respond. It also supports the objectives of this year’s Business Improvement Programme for local government, published recently by CLG and through its interconnections with other esd-toolkit initiatives including service take-up monitoring and “cost to serve” analysis within service delivery it pulls together important aspects of service delivery in one place utilising the esd-toolkit software as a delivery platform. Once local authorities understand the demographics of their local communities more fully, they can provide evidence, through the measurement of outcomes, that they are serving them better. Profiling is the first step in the journey towards understanding a ‘place’ in order to determine its future ‘shape’. Profiling has been used to confirm or challenge known facts and reveal hidden patterns of behaviour and will from the basis for Comprehensive Area Assessments in the future.
The pilot Customer Profiling Project provides three key important outputs: data, online software and consultancy. From October 2007 onwards, it is the intention to share the data through the online esd-toolkit software and emerging guidance/lessons learned with the wider local authority esd-toolkit subscribing community. Currently, work has been focused chiefly with the 13 participating local authorities. Regular progress meetings, information exchange/presentations from supporting stakeholder organisations and vigorous debate and question/answers on a close esd-toolkit discussion forum have enabled close connection between the participants.
In more detail, the project aims to map local demographic profiles (unique to each participating council) against the extensive list of services delivered to customers which is at the heart of the esd-toolkit. Data has been offered from Experian Limited to provide detailed demographic data at the household or post code level for participating councils. In addition, access to free ward-level demographic data for all subscribing authorities for an 18 month period has been agreed so that wider numbers of local authorities can experiment with the tools, guidance and lessons learned after October 2007 at no extra cost to themselves.
Through automated or semi-automated means, Councils’ customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are being mapped to the local government service list (LGSL) within esd-toolkit so that demographic profiles can be identified by volume of access against service enquiries. From this process, councils are able to understand the different demographic profiles against services delivered along with current channel preference and the cost of service delivery for each service and profile group. This management information will inform areas where efficiencies can be made and were most focus can be deployed in the future to influence channel shift and increased service efficiencies.
One of the special benefits being given to the pilot authorities is the one to one onsite support being provided by the programme to assist their data collection and transfer to the online systems and personalised reports that support their strategies and priorities..
The work will contribute to a generic approach to profiling, suitable for use in the local government community. The project is consulting with the Audit Commission, Government Connect, Cabinet Office (Insight & Channles) LGA (Customer Satisfaction) and other initiatives to ensure that different viewpoints are accommodated and a two way exchange of ideas feed individual project outputs.
Participating local authorities include: Chorley, Ealing, East Northamptonshire, Enfield, Havering, Lancashire, Lewisham, Luton, Mendip, North East Derbyshire, Redbridge, Waltham Forest, & Wokingham.
There has been so much interest during the course of the project that a second iteration of the project with an additional set of authorities looks set to begin in October 2007. This will include the “wish list” of enhancements from Phase II and take forward the lessons learned from the first pilot. Those subscribing local authorities to the esd-toolkit (we have around 350 subscribing members) can experiment with the resulting guidance, on line tools and free Experian mosaic ward level demographic data from October 2007. If you are interested in becoming a sponsoring participant in the next tranche of detailed profiling contact project manager Sheila Apicella (sheila.apicella@esd.org.uk) or programme manager Tim Adams (tim.adams@idea.gov.uk).