Local Insight is designed to be easy to use and accessible by all – so that you don’t need to be a statistician to gain useful insights. Local Insight can help answer a lot of the day-to-day questions that people have about local statistics, freeing up the time of analysts to focus on the important stuff.
As a Local Insight subscription covers unlimited users, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be being used right across your organisation and beyond. However, it can only be used if people know it is there and know how to extract the information they need.
We have put together a few tips on promoting Local Insight within your organisation and beyond. If you have any tried and tested tactics to add, please let us know.
Some of the tips below refer specifically to public sites; however everything is possible using the standard Local Insight subscription (there may be a bit more overhead in these cases for setting up and managing users!). If you would like to know more about public sites, please get in touch.
For support and more information on any of the suggestions here, please get in touch on support@ocsi.co.uk
Find the data champions
Scouting out the individuals that are already sympathetic to the benefits of instant access to local data is a great place to start in increasing uptake of Local Insight.
Take the opportunity to ask lots of questions. What will be the most appealing part of Local Insight to their team? What custom areas and services would be most useful to add? What are the potential barriers to others using Local Insight?
Use this to help shape your approach when talking to new teams, and ask your ‘data champions’ if their experiences can be used as a case study.
In addition to your own organisational knowledge on potential data champions, do also look at your user logs in Local Insight, which could give you insight into your most active users. If you would like more information on who have been your most active users over the last 3 months, get in touch and we can provide some additional information for you.
Run mini training sessions
Offering mini lunchtime training sessions to specific services (for example; CVS, elected members or commissioners) is a great way to get the word out about Local Insight. In 30 minutes you can cover basic navigation of the tool, show people where they can access reports about their local areas and the breadth of data that is available.
Equally, scheduling regular “drop in” sessions for Local Insight related questions (whether these are virtual or in person) could help increase understanding of Local Insight and the data it holds.
And of course, providing some basic support materials (either printed copies or online) to go alongside the training. If you have a public site, we can add a basic user guide to the site for you. And if you do not have a public site, we can send a copy of this to you to distribute internally.
If you would like any advice on running short training sessions, or some help in putting support materials together, please get in touch and our team will be able to help you.
Using permalinks to signpost to specific datasets
We have recently updated Local Insight to allow you to directly share links to datasets on your maps. This is much easier for the end user if you have a public site (as they will not have to be set up as a user or logged in) but works for a standard Local Insight subscription too.
This makes it much easier to signpost users directly to datasets. For example;
- Adding a direct link to the data in Local Insight in response to any data requests
- Including hyperlinks to datasets in reports and presentations (please note, this example is better suited to public sites).
Internal bulletins / social media
“The rule of seven” is a concept used in advertising, that states a prospect needs to hear or see your message at least seven times before they’ll take any action. And this concept can be transferred to the many potential Local Insight users in your organisation.
Be repetitive, and be consistent with your promotion of Local Insight. Internal bulletins, social media, and your website are great channels to push your message through. For example
- Highlight new datasets that have been added (using permalinks as above)
- Pull out interesting statistics to include in social media posts
- Add links to Local Insight in your email signature
- Start a Local Insight User Group on LinkedIn or KnowledgeHub for your organisation
- Signpost to Local Insight from any data / local statistics pages on your website
Disclaimer: Check with your comms teams that this is in line with your organisation’s policies.
If you have a public site, we can also provide you with monthly analytics on site usage. We can include information here on how people are reaching your site. This can help refine your approach and understand which channels are generating the most visits to your site. Get in touch if you would like us to set this up for you.
Your suggestions
What other tactics have you used to promote Local Insight within your organisation and beyond? What has worked well?
If you have any suggestions to add to these tips, please let us know at support@ocsi.co.uk