How we’ve made it easier to use our data
To make the most of our data, we’ve realised how important it is to present it well
Each year there are over 25 million visits to our website. This gives us data from nearly:
- 1,500,000 registered clients who use our local Citizens Advice
- 500,000 clients who use our consumer service
- 150,000 witnesses supported in courts through our Witness Service.
Every time clients get help from their local Citizens Advice — there are more than 280 across England and Wales — our trained advisers record information about the problems they’re helping with on Casebook — our new case recording tool.
This means we know how many clients we see, who they are and the main problems they face.
So all in all, we have a lot of data.
This gives us unparalleled insight into the problems people are facing, and is really valuable to our policy, campaigns and media work.
If we use it well we can influence key stakeholders to make important changes for our clients. But to make the most of our data, we’ve realised how important it is to present it well.
Building the right data tools
As part of introducing Casebook, we wanted the ability to produce reports that are accessible, visually engaging and interactive. We wanted to present our data in a way that would work for our network of local Citizens Advice, our staff and external stakeholders. The solution needed to be flexible, secure, easy to use, fast to implement and affordable.
Tableau, as a leader in data analytics, fitted the bill.
We started with Advice Trends and Consumer Advice Trends. These are interactive datasets that can be accessed by anyone. We went from providing flat Excel files and Word documents to rich and complex datasets which allow people to filter and interact with our data.
How you can explore our data
Our trend reports include data on who we’ve helped and with what problems. For example, Advice Trends shows we helped over 170,000 people with personal independence payment (PIP) issues in the past 12 months, making it the biggest advice issue.
On the consumer side, in the past year we helped people with 110,281 house fittings and appliances issues, 104,047 transport issues and 49,457 personal goods and services issues.
Our Consumer Advice Trends also includes filters and local authority maps to show in which areas of the country issues are affecting people most.
We’ve also published a number of Google Data Studio files, which can be accessed by national and local Citizens Advice. These files are similar to Tableau in that they allow users to interact with our data but are better suited to use alongside Google Analytics.
There are dashboards for each issue type, like debt, benefits and housing. This gives a very rich way to explore data and will include insights not previously published, such as client profile, mobile or laptop access, top pages viewed with trends per page.
We’ve also changed the way we count page views. We now only count these where a client has spent at least 30 seconds on the page.
What’s next?
So we now have comprehensive reports for external and internal stakeholders to explore our data and report back to funders.
But we’re continuing to explore how we can gain even more insights through our data, engaging with our users and building on the tools we have.
We’ll be working on new tools for our quality framework, new reports on our Money Advice Service and looking at other areas of our business which could benefit from making better use of our data.
If you have any questions or comments please contact datateam@citizensadvice.org.uk
