Informative workshop helps BIDs and Place Management practitioners better understand place data

Last month, the Institute and The BID Foundation co-organised an ‘Understanding Data’ workshop, hosted by outdoor advertising agency JCDecaux and sponsored by PaddingtonNow Business Improvement District (BID), both of whom are partner members of the IPM. Around 30 people from BIDs across London and even as far afield as York, spent a fascinating afternoon understanding how data and insights can be interpreted and used in real life situations to help curate places.

PaddingtonNow BID area was used as a case study for the event, demonstrating footfall flow and retail clustering, amongst other insights, including reaction from the extinction rebellion protest earlier that week.

Commenting on the success of the workshop, Executive Director of the Institute, Cat Mitton said, “The richness of the data was astounding - I am pleased that we were able to demonstrate the systematic insight JCDecaux have on how people use and move around places through this event. BIDs are increasingly moving towards a place curation agenda, supporting local authorities and landowners to shape the future of their high streets and town centres, thus having data that enables this decision-making is valuable to our membership.”

The workshop received excellent feedback from participants. Sharing his feedback, Dan Sandford, Head of Place Management from The Fitzrovia Partnership said, “It was a great event – really insightful and I took away a huge amount of knowledge from it. Thank you for arranging.”

The Institute is working with The BID Foundation to include similar workshops in our 2020 programmme, which we will announce in the New Year.