Building an in-house tool for the Auckland City Council

Where it all started...
Back in 2008, Datamine undertook some profiling and mapping work for Auckland City Council to help them better understand the population in Auckland City. Following on from this work, Auckland City Council submitted a brief for the development of an in-house tool that would help them to understand their five ‘community places’ better.

These places are comprised of North, South, East, West and Central Auckland City, and each of these regions has a Place Manager, who works as part of the Community Services Team and allocates resources and funding, as deemed necessary.

A tool for self-diagnosing
Datamine developed an analysis tool for the Auckland City Council to run themselves in-house, to enable a better understanding of their community populations. Levels of wellbeing, education, health and a range of other relevant variables, including how each of these communities perceives itself, are used as inputs to help the Council to identify resource gaps in the needs of their various communities.

A number of data sources were used for the development of the tool, to ensure its validity and usefulness. Some of these sources included Census data, Ministry of Health information, Crime data from the Police, Nielsen’s Quality of Life Survey results, and Auckland City internal data, including noise control information and safety perceptions survey results.

What is the tool, and this accumulation of data, helping us to learn?
Findings from all of these sources and more were fed into the analysis tool. While the Council knew the results from the Quality of Life survey, as they were a partner in the research, it was interesting to see the comparison between ‘Places’ as these were overlaid with the results. Some of the findings here included the fact that volunteering was highest in the poorest communities, most charitable income was to registered offices that were not in the locations of need and poverty and ethnicity had a correlation in many neighbourhoods. Also interesting to learn when the Police’s crime data was fed into the tool was that perceptions of safety did not usually coincide with high incidences of actual crime.

So, what of the data, and the tool, now?
The tool is R-based and Datamine provided comprehensive documentation and training for Council staff to run it in-house. It enables the production of tables and graphs and can be used to compare the five ‘places’ against different indicators, or the regional average. The tool can also be used to drill down further to look at individual area units, school zones, or the catchment areas around Community and Library Centres.

According to Max Adler, Central Place Manager at Auckland City Council, they have already derived value from the tool, “in producing graphs for community discussions and data highlights for our strategic planning.”

“A new opportunity was spotted during development of the tool, so school zones and community facilities were included as catchments for reporting. New data like that on volunteering has helped us with insights as to community initiatives and a better scan for localities to focus our programmes on and better rationalisation between project choices will be a real benefit of this project to the community,” says Max.

Minor modifications are being made to the model at present, to add a few more variables and some additional functionality, including the ability to project population trends up to 2031 and look retrospectively at Census variables back to 1991. Currently the tool leverages a stationary body of data, a snapshot of the situation at a given point of time, but the idea is to refresh the tool annually, with the most current versions of the data available.

There are further plans for Datamine to redesign the tool later this year, to fit the new geographic definitions of the Super City, when these are confirmed.