Cheshire East Council Case Study

by | Oct 15, 2024 | Articles, Events, Insights | 0 comments

Harnessing Data to Transform Town Centres: The Cheshire East Council Case Study

The partnership between Cheshire East Council and Visitor Insights demonstrates how data can be effectively harnessed to improve town centre management and secure financial backing for local initiatives.

In today’s data-driven world, local councils are increasingly looking for ways to monitor and enhance the performance of their town centres. One standout case is Cheshire East Council; partnering with Visitor Insights to access data on visitor behaviour through a series of monthly reports on eleven town centres and multiple town centre sectors and locations. This collaboration continues to provide invaluable insights to support town centre regeneration and economic development, as well as helping secure funding for projects.

The Challenge

Cheshire East Council oversees a vast area, including 11 town centres across the North West of England. For their Economic Development, Regeneration and Planning teams, understanding visitor patterns was critical. They needed to monitor these town centres, assess their performance and benchmark these against historical data. The Council was looking for a robust data solution to provide a range of insights in monthly PDF reports that could be easily shared with various stakeholders, both internally and externally.
However, analysing meaningful visitor metrics, especially across multiple towns and using a broad range of datasets, was a challenge. The Council required specific data points delivered and presented in clear and actionable formats to drive regeneration projects, measure the success of events, and support their funding applications.

The Solution: Visitor Insights’ monthly reporting

To meet their needs, Cheshire East Council turned to Visitor Insights and their monthly reporting. VI’s offering allowed Cheshire East to create a template of bespoke reports, which showed the precise datasets that they needed.

Visits

Dwell time

Catchment origin maps

Visit frequency graphs

The reports were customized into two formats:

  1. A one-page summary report for each town centre, which provided a high-level overview of key statistics.
  2. A comprehensive ten-page report that included more detailed metrics and maps, allowing for deeper analysis.

These reports provided the Council with year-over-year (YOY) and month-over-month (MOM) comparisons, giving them the ability to benchmark the current performance of their town centres against historical data.

The Benefits

Using Visitor Insights’ reports, Cheshire East Council are now able to:

    • Monitor the performance of all 11 town centres on a monthly basis.
    • Share insights efficiently across various teams and stakeholders.
    • Use data to make more informed decisions on town centre development and funding applications.

One of the major outcomes was the ability to use this data to secure funding for regeneration projects. Craig Wallace, Senior Regeneration Officer at Cheshire East Council, highlighted the importance of this, stating that the data from Visitor Insights “enabled us to add more weight and insight into funding applications, some of which have seen successful bids and additional funds coming into the authority”.

Visitor Insights’ datasets delivered the necessary tools to monitor and evaluate key performance metrics, providing a data-driven foundation for decisions that benefit the community. With access to clear, actionable reports, Cheshire East Council continues to drive successful projects that enhance the vibrancy of their towns.

Read and Download full Case Study

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