A step-by-step guide to using the National Infrastructure Database to drive planning, investment, and community impact.
It can be difficult to get excited about infrastructure data (we appreciate that!), but knowing where it could take your team or network, and the story it could underpin, is fundamental to better collaboration between delivery, planning and funding bodies. Here’s a step by step guide to getting ahead of the game.
Step 1: Basic reporting
Quite simply, how many sites and/or facilities do we have within our area, and where are they? This can include filtering on information such as ownership, quality, ancillary provision, and accessibility, as well as by geographic area. Facilities can have multiples types of usage and seasonal availability, which helps with understanding current and potential capacity to accommodate your sport or activity.
Step 2: Relative provision
Want good swimming pool availability, move to South Australia, with 1.28 pools per 10,000 population!
A high level indicator of possible capacity and availability, this starts to show the relative levels of provision and what ‘good looks like’, especially when aligned with population levels. While good supply doesn’t necessarily mean good accessibility (the spread of capacity isn’t always aligned with need) or good quality, it is often a useful high-level starting point.
Step 3: Data connections
Know what your infrastructure is doing already, before wanting more. This means overlaying and appending any existing membership, team/club or workforce information.
It can also mean using innovative other approaches, such as Movement Data, which leverages the GPS from millions of mobile devices to track overall usage and users of any facilities and spaces. Knowing what’s working and what’s not, will inform what next.
It is also important to consider what’s happening on the other side of your boundary line and how the market is currently behaving around the entire infrastructure network.
Step 4: Forecasting need
This is where it starts to get interesting!
Not everyone within a population has the same likelihood (or propensity) to use each type of facility (this is what we call ‘demand’). By using a sample of data on actual participants, and understanding in detail the attributes of these participants, it’s possible to extrapolate out this understanding across an entire population to estimate total demand – see ActiveXchange’s Market Reach and Demand.
Demand can be affected by the need to travel to a facility (travel time decay) or the type of facility. This can lead to ‘unmet demand’ where a portion of your demand falls into a gap due to accessibility and/or capacity or quality (attractiveness) of existing facilities. On the latter facilities may be able to adapt their offer to reach more of this unmet demand – see ActiveXchange’s Acquire module which uses market insights and forecasting to optimally align the offer at each facility to the immediate needs of prospect members (local unmet demand).
From a strategic planning perspective, and to focus resources on key enabling partnerships, it’s important to pinpoint where new provision is needed. To be proactive and not reactive. This picture will evolve over time, so future forecasting your demand is important as the profile of populations change. It’s then possible to generate a priority list of locations where new provision is needed, or capacity needs to be expanded, and know exactly the size of the market you are expecting to reach against each potential project.
If I’m a sport, this is why I’m knocking on your door local government, and vice versa!
Step 5: Evidence (potential) impact
Now tell me more about who you’re expecting to reach. To bring partners, especially government, around the table we need to move from infrastructure to residents, communities and importantly policy outcomes (Community Reach).
It’s taking the unmet demand you’ll be aiming to reach, and converting this into a picture of resident demographics, and telling a story about how you can level the playing field from an equity of access, diversity and inclusion (EDI) perspective.
Go even further and tell your story in terms of the monetary savings to society this infrastructure is or will generate by reaching this unmet demand. Chances are that this will be multiple times more than the cost of the infrastructure.
This is where Social Value comes to life.
Know your community. Grow your community.
ActiveXchange works with partners across sport, recreation, government, and industry to progress through these five steps, providing a far better line of sight on how and where to focus their own resources on growth and impact.
Together with a network of contributing partners, we’ve developed and maintained the Australian National Infrastructure Database over the past five years. With 50,000+ sites and data from more than 150 national and state sports, it’s a powerful, free tool available to the sector so any team can begin their data journey today.
For further information: [email protected]
