Introducing our Inclusive Growth Dashboard

In updating and relaunching their Inclusive Growth Strategy, Leeds City Council wanted a way to easily track their progress across a set of key economic indicators. Whilst they’ve been doing this for a while, it was often difficult to ensure that everyone across the Council was accessing the same, accurate, and up-to-date information. The website of the Office for National Statistics is thorough but hard to navigate, particularly for data at a local level, and reports were sometimes produced with incorrect or out-of-date information as not everyone was sure where to access it from. This made it difficult to accurately track progress, as well as how Leeds was performing compared to other areas around the country.

To help solve this, and as part of a year-long relationship of working with Open Innovations to support their economic insight, Leeds City Council commissioned Open Innovations to build a lightweight microsite that makes accessing the data they need quicker and easier.

The dashboard is, like all of our work at Open Innovations, open-source, and you can see the code that runs it in its own GitHub repository. It’s built in R, utilising the Shiny library and a Bootstrap UI. It works in four main sections: a quick and visually clear dashboard that presents the latest data (with an option to see a time series); a more detailed overview of all the indicators going back over time; a detail & comparison section where you can compare Leeds’ data with that of the other Core Cities in the UK as well as the larger geographies of West Yorkshire, Yorkshire and The Humber, and the UK; and a data section where you can filter and download the data to use for your own analysis.

The data presented is always up-to-date, as we collect it from a combination of APIs provided by NOMIS and Stat-Xplore as well as some of our own economic data architecture. This means that it’s simple to maintain from both our and the client’s side, and users will always be presented with the right information, providing a crucial single point of truth.

We’re already receiving some great feedback from users, and incorporating small improvements as we go along. We see this as a valuable tool for a range of audiences, from analysts and researchers through to decision makers and politicians, and are exploring how we can work with partners and sponsors to roll out similar tools for other organisations. 

We're planning to develop the tool further, acting on feedback and enabling wider regional comparisons, supporting organisations to visualise their local economy and inform their decision-making. 

If you think you might benefit from a simple tool like this (and you can see it here), then get in touch!