Data
Profiling households in Calderdale using Mosaic is useful to understand the types and groups of people living in our area and likely recipients of our services. However, applying the Mosaic codes to our actual address data of service users enables us to see the likely profile of people for each service.
For example, by profiling address data of people buying theatre tickets for a certain type of show; we can see what groups they are likely to belong to, where they live and what their likely lifestyles and behaviours are. This will help us to tailor communications appropriately in the future and look at what other shows they may be interested in.
To get the best intelligence from profiling using household data, we first needed reliable, clean service data to profile against. This was one of the biggest issues in using this type of customer profiling as some services do not collect data, don't clean it or it was not possible to extract the data in order to make the profiling meaningful.
Once we did have service data to work with, we then needed to ensure we had sufficient quantities. The key here is to check what the profiling is telling you about who is using a service with what you already know about service users from other forms of research.
Another important area to consider when working with your service data is to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act. In Calderdale we worked with our legal team and DPA officer to draw up guidance of how to profile data and comply with our legal responsibilities in this area. We drew up a 'Data Handling Guide' to reassure services and the organisation that our customer profiling was within data protection guidance. The Data Handling Guide sets out how we ensure that potential identification of individuals is avoided.
The only data set that we needed was the addresses - all other service information was removed before being sent to us for profiling. As the profiles are the only information we are interested in, the data is destroyed once the profiling is done, in accordance with our internal instructions.
Summary
- Collect address and postcode data on who uses your services, in a consistent way and in a usable format and keep it clean
- Ensure that any data profiling complies with the Data Protection Act
- Check with your IT team on how to use data and follow instructions
- Be careful of quantities - low numbers may skew the intelligence
- Remove duplicates where applicable - you may want to leave some duplicates in for example where the same person has used a service several times you may want to count this in your profiling
- The data provides the basis for the intelligence - if the data is poor, the intelligence will be poor