The Power of Postcodes
This guide and the data that postcodes produce is only applicable to organisations working in the UK.
Recording the postcodes of where your attendees come from, and the locations that you are delivering in, can provide important information about both the geographic area and the socio-economic disparities of areas and communities you are working in.
The information postcodes provide can then be used and reported on to make strategic decisions for your organisation and better understand your audience and reach.
When a postcode is recorded for an attendee or location, Upshot will provide information about the administrative divisions the postcode is within (Authority, District, Constituency and Ward) as well as the IMD (Index of multiple deprivation) and LSOA Code (Lower Super Output Area code), geographical classifications to assess the level of deprivation in different areas across the UK.
There are two different areas to consider regarding postcodes in Upshot. One is attendee postcodes, the other is your organisation’s delivery postcodes (locations). Both will be explored in this guide.
- Recording Postcodes
- Reporting on Postcodes
- Postcodes within the 'Upshot Map'
- Adding Missing Postcodes on attendees
Recording Postcodes
For Attendees . . .
Attendee postcodes are recorded on their profile. They are captured within the attendee 'Core Address Fields' on your registration form, attendee sign-up form or via a bulk upload of existing data.
Recording attendee postcodes also allows you to be able to see their Authority, District, Constituency, Ward and IMD Percentile via the summary panel on any individual profile. This can provide key information about the attendee’s local community and the level of deprivation in which they live.
Note: System Admins can ensure 'Core Address Fields' that contain the postcode are included in your registration form and/or attendee sign up form from Admin > Data Display Options. From here, the Core Address Field can also be made mandatory, if desired.
For Locations . . .
The second place postcode data is captured is via Locations, from which you can record where you deliver your work. These are added, stored and edited in the Admin tab, via the “Add locations” or “Edit locations” options. When creating locations it is mandatory (if in the UK) to add in a postcode of that particular location. Every session recorded in Upshot must have a location associated to it.
The information generated by postcodes of locations can be exported from the system by going to Admin > Edit Locations > Download Locations.
The export contains:
- Location name
- Location's core address fields
- Authority, District, Constituency and Ward
- LSOA code
- IMD percentage
- Longitude and Latitude
- Pitchfinder site ID*
- Edubase URN**
*Pitchfinder site ID –this is automatically generated if the location was selected from the Sport England Active Places Facilities Database and is a Football Foundation funded site. This is generated if the location was added onto Upshot from the “Choose a location from Sport England Active Places Facilities Database option.
**Edubase URN – this is automatically generated if the location is a school, college or university and was added onto Upshot from the Choose a school, college or university from England or Wales option.
Reporting on Postcodes
People Report
The People Report can be used to report against the attendees on your account using a variety of filters. Some of the filters most appropriate to reporting on postcodes are the Authority, District, Constituency and Ward filters. These can be used to identify attendees that come from a specific area, or specific areas.
Often, organisation aims/objectives include engaging with people from deprived areas. Postcodes are commonly used to record the Index of multiple deprivation (IMD) percentage of specific areas. Collecting postcodes allows you to easily identify these people using the IMD slider in the People Report.
Filters on the report can be used individually or in conjunction with other filters throughout the report.
This information is also included in the download of the People Report.
Note: Areas with a lower IMD % are considered more deprived, while a higher IMD % indicates less deprivation. The IMD % combines various indicators such as income, employment, health, education and living environment to create an index of deprivation of every postcode in the country. E.g. to find individuals from the most deprived quintile the sliders should be set at 0-20%.
To find out more about the People Report please click here.
Attendance Report
When downloading the Attendance Report and ticking “include personal details”, the report will pull through the postcode of each attendee that has attended the specific project/activity that you are reporting on as well as the Local Authority, District, Constituency, Ward and IMD percentage for that attendee.
This information can then be queried on Microsoft Excel to look at engagement levels of attendees that come from specific geographical areas, or areas of deprivation.
To find out more about the Attendance Report please click here.
Reporting Template
At Upshot we have built a number of reporting templates to help users to report on their data. These templates allow users to drop existing Upshot report exports into the template, refresh the report and automatically be presented with a summary of the data.
One such reporting template is for reporting on Attendee Locations, and utilises the postcode and Attendance Report.
By copying data from an organisation's Attendance Report export into the pre-built reporting template, organisations can report on their attendance data grouped by the following location options:
- First half of the postcode
- Authority
- District
- Constituency
- Ward
- IMD Bracket
For more information on our reporting templates and to download the template for Attendee Locations, please see here.
Measured Indicators
As reporting against attendee postcodes is very common and organisations often having targets around engaging people from more deprived communities (areas with a low IMD percentage) it is also possible to create Measured Indicators on Upshot to track performance against this.
When creating a Measured indicator around the number of unique attendees, users can apply filters to specify that the indicator should only focus on those attendees with a certain IMD % that have been engaged in a particular activity, activities, or whole project.
Postcodes within the 'Upshot Map'
Capturing postcodes on Upshot via the registration form will allow you to visualise your attendees using the Map Report.
The map provides you with a visual representation – based off postcodes - of where your attendees are coming from to take part in the sessions you hold (Black icons), the Location of these sessions (Green icons), and where your attendees who are yet to participate in one of your sessions are from (Grey icons).
A well-used and vital element of the Map Report is around the mapping of attendees and locations overlaid with Office of National Statistics Data (ONS) to visually display your engagement in areas of high (or low) deprivation.
The IMD can be broken down into any of the following areas:
- Overall
- Income
- Crime
- Housing
- Education, skills and training
- Healthcare
- Employment
- Living environment
This can also be looked at in varying levels of specificity, to see areas from region down to Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA). An LSOA contains between 1,000 and 3,000 residents with 400 to 1,200 households.
For example, if you can see that a significant number of your attendees are coming from an area of high crime rate, you might think about delivering anti-crime workshops. If you are already delivering anti-crime workshops, you might consider relocating the workshops closer to that particular area.
When you then also analyse the locations of your organisation’s delivery (all locations that are entered into Upshot will automatically feed into the Map Feature), this can lead to some interesting information about how you might be able to improve the service you are offering and the help you are able to provide, and more importantly where you are providing these services.
For example, you might see that a majority of your attendees are coming from the East of your city/town but the locations you are delivering in are all over in the West. It could then be worth considering finding locations in the East to use, or trying to engage more of the local community around your delivery locations in the West.
Note: The current most recent data set for IMD was taken in 2019, and is updated with new data when made available.
If you are an organisation that looks at activity levels and helps to improve this in your communities, you can make use of postcodes to understand activity trends within your local communities.
Taking data from Sport England’s Active Lives survey, we can see, by area, what the average activity levels of the population look like. This is broken down into “Active”,“Fairly Active” and “Inactive”.
Adding Missing Postcodes on attendees
As covered in this guide, postcodes generate a lot of powerful information. For many organisations it is vital to ensure postcodes are collected for the attendees they are working with.
From the home page, you can easily identify how many and what percentage of your total attendee database in Upshot has a postcode recorded on their profile.
This helps you to keep up to date with your data and ensure that reporting and figures can be as accurate as possible.
On Upshot you can also view the specific people that are missing postcodes from People > Add Missing Data and filtering Show Missing only for > Postcode.
From this page, you can directly enter attendee's postcodes, this will then be reflected on their profile. More about this page can be found here.