Civic Data Innovation Challenge
Beginning in 2022, The Mayor of London, together with Impact on Urban Health’s innovation programme, invited applications for the Civic Data Innovation Challenge, tasking innovators across London with finding new ways to measure community strength and helping us answer questions like:
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How can we measure the strength of relationships, social support or civic responsibility at a local / ward level?
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What proxies can we use to measure civic and community strength in London?
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How do we harness civic data standards to improve consistency across everything we measure in London?
The first round of the challenge provided £10,000 in grant funding to nine innovative data projects in one or more areas of London. These projects illuminated myriad lessons, including the importance of community networks to data collection, the need for clear questions in collating information about communities, and the importance of telling compelling stories with data.
Round 2, which launched in September 2023, is currently providing up to £60,000 to pan-London data projects that strengthen one facet of the Civic Strength Tool, a first-of-its-kind framework and index to consolidate existing data on what makes communities strong.
Through this challenge, the Mayor of London harnesses our city’s innovation and creativity to boost understanding of London’s civic data. The outcomes will directly help bolster the evidence base for place-based projects within civil society, improving our understanding, methods, and use of civic data.
What we’ve accomplished
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Round 1 of the challenge focused on measuring aspects of the Civic Strength Tool’s index throughout one or two of London’s boroughs. Nine projects were funded in 2022 for Round 1.
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Round 2 broadened the scope of the challenge and explored datasets across London. Four groups were funded (two of these were scaling up Round 1 projects)
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Round 2 also saw the introduction of a Community of Practice around civic data projects, facilitated by a commissioned support provider, Profusion.
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In early 2024, we commissioned Apteligen to evaluate the impact of the challenge and collate lessons learned across the projects.
What's next
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Apteligen's findings will be available in Autumn 2024, once Round 2 of the challenge draws to a close.
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At the programme’s conclusion, we will share our learnings from the programme to promote greater understanding of community strength across London.
Round 2 challenge grantees (2023/2024)
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MyCake specialises in financial benchmarking and building place-based dashboards to show the reach and impact of charities and social enterprises at local level.
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Grant amount: £60,000
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Project: Their project is currently working to create a new method of measuring the contribution of charities, formal volunteers, and funders to London’s civic strength. Drawing on existing datasets, their work aims to refine and better calibrate the way voluntary and community sector activity is accounted for within the Civic Strength Tool.
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London Sport supports all Londoners to live healthier lives by being more active, focusing their efforts on those parts of the capital facing the starkest health inequalities.
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Grant amount: £59,362
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Project: Their project is the first to attempt to compile a full list of community Sport and Physical Activity (SPA) organisations in London, with the aim of improving the understanding of the social opportunities these groups offer and the accessibility of local SPA groups.
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Neighbourly Lab is a not-for-profit company, based in the Evidence Quarter in Westminster. They are a research and evidence-gathering organisation focused on using innovation to increase social connection, reduce loneliness and isolation, and create more resilient communities.
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Grant amount: £59,950
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Project: Building on their work from Round 1, Neighbourly Lab are working alongside Londoners to define ‘belonging’ and identify available datasets to measure it at a local level. For this project, they are working with Lewisham and Newham councils.
- Migrant Democracy Project is an apolitical organisation that seeks to empower migrants to actively participate in political and public life and shape a fairer immigration system.
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Grant amount: £59,706
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Project: MDP are working to expand their CDIC Round 1 research to understand Councillor representation in London. Their project aims to survey all elected Councillors across London to better understand their background, experiences and any barriers that might exist to democratic participation among marginalised groups.
Round 1 challenge grantees (2022)
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Time to Spare is a platform for delivering and measuring community impact. They work with charities, community groups and the public sector to make it easier for people to discover, access and understand each other's services.
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Grant amount: £10,000
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The project explored how the Civic Strength Index can measure ongoing engagement with community projects through the use of activity retention metrics.
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Neighbourly Lab is a not-for-profit company, based in the Evidence Quarter in Westminster. They are a research and evidence-gathering organisation focused on using innovation to increase social connection, reduce loneliness and isolation, and create more resilient communities.
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Grant amount: £10,000
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The project measured the prevalence of neighbourhood online communities at ward level, such as street WhatsApp groups, and determined which Londoners are disproportionately excluded from these spaces. By doing so, it helped address the Civic Strength Index’s current gap in data under the “Relationships and Social Capital” theme.
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POMOC is a grassroots non-profit that fosters creative collaboration and actionable solidarity between Polish women living in the UK and other migrant communities.
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Grant amount: £10,000
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Their project explored how representative local politics is of the communities they serve. For this research they compiled existing data on councillors’ age, gender, and ethnicity for 2018-2021, for all London boroughs, and then piloted a survey including additional characteristics, such as socio-economic background and migration status, in Camden. The results were shared via a report with all councillors in Camden.
- London Higher is the representative body for almost 50 universities and higher education colleges across the capital. They are committed to raising the voice of London’s higher education and research sector and ensuring their members are making the London higher education experience the best it can be for students and staff from around the world.
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Grant amount: £10,000
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Their project developed a tracker for how the capital’s higher education providers contribute to civic strength in London. It collected robust and insightful data on social capital and collaboration between organisations, their participants, and connections to local networks in Brixton. The project gathered new data and insights about the social value that strong relationships and collaborations create for communities.
- AKOU is a social impact consultancy. They help people to prove the good they do and build better connections. They love understanding data, telling stories, and designing new ways for people to share and make more use of their own data.
- Grant amount: £10,000
- This project collected robust and insightful data on social capital and collaboration between organisations, their participants, and connections to local networks in Brixton. The project gathered new data and insights about the social value that strong relationships and collaborations create for communities.
- Involve is the UK’s leading public participation charity, with an unrivalled record in delivering participatory and deliberative public engagement processes that make a meaningful difference and put people at the heart of decision making.
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Grant amount: £10,000
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This project developed a toolkit to enable local decision makers to define what types of deliberative and participatory processes they are using, and to identify the impacts on themselves and local communities. Deliberative and participatory engagement processes are becoming more common, and more diverse in their type and focus. Evidence shows that taking part in such processes creates measurable impacts, for example on the opinions and behaviours of participants, on the views of decision makers, and on levels of wider public trust in the decisions the processes inform. In this rich and rapidly moving space, identifying the components of good practice takes some analysis and definition, and a constant ‘stock-take’ of state of play.
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