How visitor data and insights help councils with planning | Clive Hall;

How visitor data and insights help councils with planning

Footfall and location data help planners understand how their visitors are behaving, where they are being attracted from and what services they are using, explains Clive Hall

It is certainly a challenging time for anyone involved in the planning process for towns, cities and high streets across the UK. The huge shift in consumer behaviour due to the increase in online solutions and the ongoing impact of the pandemic has changed how our centres are being utilised. For many councils, they have had to quickly adapt to the loss of key visitor attractions such as large department stores or other popular retail outlets disappearing from our high streets.

At Place Informatics we provide footfall and location visitor behaviour data monitoring to organisations such as town and city councils, retail and shopping sites, large chains, leisure parks, tourism destinations, heritage and environmental custodians.

Our market-leading insights are used by over 250 towns and cities across the UK helping council planners understand how their visitors are behaving, where they are being attracted from and most importantly what services they are utilising on their visit including retail, leisure, green spaces and car parks. Our platform offers our customers a featurerich dashboard giving them access to the huge volume of data in a useable format with visual graphs and charts for their location that can be distributed to key stakeholders easily.

We work with a number of councils in the Greater London area and our data gives them detailed information to show how their visitors are currently behaving and also which postcodes they are visiting from, giving them the information they need to ensure their proposed initiatives have the very best chance of being successful. Our solutions offer insights such as the best time of day to run events, the expected increase in footfall and socioeconomic data can even provide guidance and reassurance to investors or funding bodies that the right demographic is in their catchment area.

By using GDPR compliant anonymous mobile GPS location data we are able to provide actionable insights which help support and enable decision making – to assist in health and safety, conservation, events, marketing and return on investment for economic regeneration projects.

One of the London based councils we have worked closely with has used the detailed visitor insights to adapt their largest shopping centre, following the closure of a large department store and a key green space (urban park) which historically had been a popular destination for visitors. The combined loss reduced the volume of visitors to their main shopping centre and was therefore impacting businesses and services and the local community as a whole.

By using our platform, the council planners were able to understand what services were now attracting visitors and adapt accordingly. It was evident that Doctors surgeries and other community-based services were bringing a large number of visitors to the area, but none of these were available in the town centre. Armed with this knowledge the team at the council decided to adapt the top floor of the shopping centre into a community focused space specifically for doctors surgeries and other historically popular services.

These changes have already hugely increased footfall to the town centre, reduced the impact of the loss of the former visitor attractions and benefitted many local businesses and services.

Our data dashboards are accessed by various teams across councils’ services, heritage and tourist organisations – ranging from planning, strategic marketing, public event management, conservation, funding applications, parking to facilities management solutions. A broad range of stakeholders across retail sites such as tenants and landlords, commercial property agents, facilities management and shopping centre owners – can all benefit from access to the data sets.

Across the spectrum, the data can also assist with decision-making for commercial agreements such as between landlords and tenants, advertising rate setting or commercial pitch trading pricing, shareholder fund investments and proposals for planning and development.

Customers benefit from the simplicity of our market-leading dashboard, our ability to provide retrospective data going back to pre-pandemic 2019 and the automatically generated charts and graphs that make it easy to spot trends.

Visitor Insights help planners make good, informed decisions based on historic evidence and quickly show how changes have a positive impact on town centres and communities. n

Clive Hall is Founder and CEO of Place Informatics

Clive Hall is co-founder and CEO of Place Informatics, a provider of visitor insights and footfall data for over 250 town centres, retail sites, shopping centres, leisure parks, tourism destinations, Heritage Action Zones (HAZ) and custodians of open spaces..