It is incredible to think that, while the world around us is barely recognisable since the old BVPI survey was launched in 2000 - to be replaced by that beloved Place Survey - little has changed in the way we collect insight from our communities.
Most surveys conducted, using that familiar framework, are still wedded to understanding what people think of council services.
Do we really think that knowing whether people are satisfied with libraries is somehow going to lay the golden egg of insight that enables us to tackle intrinsic issues?
Now, don’t get me wrong, as a communicator whose job in part is about protecting and enhancing reputation, I am not going to be telling my council leader any day soon that we should no longer be interested in what people think about their public services.
But it strikes me that we need to build in layers of richer insight, something that gets under the skin of our communities and enables us to correlate attitudes to trust against, values, behaviours, ambitions and barriers.
In short we need to know much more about the drivers, influencers and barriers behind self-reliance, aspiration, capacity and civic identity. Perhaps then we can use this insight to begin to unpick these issues and understand how it translates to the way we design services and our wider relationship with our communities.
In most areas the amount of money spent on public services far exceeds that of multi-nationals. Could you imagine a major supermarket chain relying on binary data around satisfaction of bananas rather than understanding what drives consumer demand against segments of the population?
My work with different councils has led me to believe that, while economic polarity exists in many places, there is no divide when it comes to the desire of people to get on in life. The only difference is the extent to which they need support to plug into networks that help them achieve this. Understanding this really is the golden goose.
Simon Jones is an account director with Westco and chair of LGcomms
