Assessing needs/consultation

Arts Council England

Culture Map is a new online resource that brings together information about cultural provision in London with data about users and audiences.

Audience Insight is research produced by Arts Council England into audience segmentation. The segmentation provides new insight into how and why different kinds of people engage with the arts in England today. It can also be used as a source of ideas and intelligence for developing targeted engagement and communication strategies for building new audiences for the arts.

CABE

CABE has produced New things happen: a guide to the future Thames Gateway.  It describes the identity and character of the Thames Gateway and defines the key ideas that should be at the heart of planning policies, investment strategies, design decisions and environmental projects across the area.

Museums, Libraries & Archives

The MLA’s Community Profiles is a short guide which offers advice on the use of community profiling to inform appropriate and effective service planning.

Community Engagement in Public Libraries, published by the MLA, offers guidance on engaging with communities for public library staff. If engaged in the right way, communities can exert more influence over decisions that concern their neighbourhood and local services.

The MLA Community Libraries Programme Evaluation identifies examples of best practice and recommends areas for improvement in the Big Lottery Community Libraries Programme. This programme focuses on capital investment in libraries that meet the specific needs of their communities.

MLA has produced Moving to Museum Trusts: Learning from Experience, a report that offers advice and guidance on transferring museums to Trust status.

Sport England

The Facilities Improvement Service (FIS) was launched by Sport England in 2007 and is a three year targeted programme designed to offer support to local authorities in strategically plan for sports facilities.  As the service has developed, a methodology for working, lessons learnt and best practice have been collated. This has been brought together in a toolkit, produced in conjunction with Genesis consulting which can be used by other local authorities not in the service to strategically plan for sports facilities. 

Active Places is an online database of sports facilities, providing an easily accessible and authoritative source of information for people to find out where their nearest facilities are and how they can become active. It includes sports facilities as well as health and fitness clubs, which and can be searched for by area or by facility type.

The Active Places Power site provides local authorities with tools to help assess their existing provision and identify potential gaps.

Sport England has created the Planning Contributions Kitbag - a suite of resources to help local authorities ensure that the sport and recreation needs created by new developments are provided in the right place and at the right time. The kitbag contains the latest news on the development of planning contributions by government, together with good practice examples of benefits to sport through new development. Tools included in the kitbag are:

• Sports Facilities Calculator - This helps with quantifying the demand side of the facility provision equation. It answers questions such as “How much additional demand for swimming will the population of a new development area generate, and what would the cost be to meet this new demand at today’s values?” The SFC can be used to estimate the facility needs of discrete populations, such as sports hall and swimming pool needs created by a new community of a residential development.
• Towards a Level Playing Field – a guide to the production of playing pitch strategies.
• Team Generation Rate Calculator – The team generation rate is the number of people from a specific age group required to make up one team. It is used to calculate the local rate of team formation, which can then be compared to the national or regional average. This calculator works out the team generation rate for the main pitch sports within your local authority area.

The Facilities Planning Model is a spatial modelling service to help assess the level of demand for swimming pools and sports halls that is currently being met. The service can test out bespoke scenarios to see the impact of closing and opening new facilities and the impact of new population on facility provision. This is a chargeable service available to local authorities and can be accessed through the regional Sport England offices.