Once you understand what profiling can do and have a specific aim / service issue you think profiling may help to address, look at the stages for carrying out profiling within your organisation:
1
- 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 more information on how we tackled data issues at Calderdale, please go to the Data Section.
- Back to top
2
- Match service data to Mosaic code
- Once we had profiles of our likely residents, we then wanted to use Mosaic to profile service data to see who are our likely service users are. We had choices - use a third party such as Experian to do the profiling for us or do the profiling ourselves in-house.
- Once we extracted service data in a format that the GIS team were able to profile and map, we could see service profiles against Calderdale profiles where service users are located and where there are gaps / issues we may want to look more closely at.
- Back to top
3
- Map
- Map the profiles to see where service users and non-users live. This can help with identifying travel times and distances and potentially, where to locate services aimed at specific groups
- The profiles of non-users gives us a steer as to what factors may affect them taking up a service, such as transport links, other competing services nearby etc., where to locate communications, how they may wish to be communicated with and what messages might be used to address this.
- Back to top
4
- Analyse the profiling
- What is the profile showing in terms of service usage? What groups are using the service compared to the proportion of those groups in the area? Are some groups / types not using the service and is this what you expected? Are there lifestyle behaviour characteristics that may explain service usage / take-up?
- Back to top
5
- Other Research / Intelligence
- The profiling of service data will give just one picture of who uses services. It is important to check what the profiling is showing against other research and what service staff already know about who uses the service. It is worth re-iterating again here that profiling is based on 'modelled' data and therefore is not always going to be 'right'. You may also have a different profile of service users to other authorities, depending on your area.
- Back to top
6
- Identify actions
- So how will you use the intelligence you have gathered? Go back to the service issue / aim you were hoping the profiling would help you to address. For example, if you have low take-up of your service in a specific geographic area, has the profiling shown you some possible reasons for this? How does other research support this? What action will you take as a result?
- Back to top
7
- Implementation
- Implement your actions - try and be flexible in your approach and ensure you have planned to measure responses / results before you go ahead.
- Back to top
8
- Measure / Feed into future planning
- If you are collecting service data you can continue to use profiling to measure whether your actions have had an impact on your service issue. Using the example above, by profiling service data after your actions you can see if take-up has increased within the area you were targeting.
- Back to top
Calderdale Pilots
We have used these stages in Calderdale to pilot the use of customer profiling within services. Although we have some results, profiling is a long term approach and some of the outcomes will be realised in the future. (See section Case Studies).
Summary
- You may find you have the skills / capability in-house to profile your data, map it, analyse it, pull out the intelligence and identify possible uses. If not, there are consultancies that specialise in this area, Experian being one of them.
- Having a process (such as the profiling loop) for carrying out profiling gives some consistency across your organisation and helps you to make the most of the intelligence.
- The process given here is not the only way to carry out profiling - investigate how others have done it and work out what's right for your organisation.