Leakage Reports - How My Borough Plans to Revitalize Downtown by Buying Data
Understanding the tools and data breakdown is only half the truth.
Our planning commission gathers on the second Thursday of every month to review our progress on the comprehensive plan. A comprehensive plan is a rough framework that gives our local government a path to success. We have to open the plan and understand the details to understand how our data is used for and against us.
Our planning commission spans many age ranges, income levels, and genders, and we all live in the borough. We have been working for two years on our local comprehensive plan with success, but we were not getting anything else accomplished. We needed to speed up the process. We decided to hire a professional to help us.
Bringing in a professional to help us was our best idea to date as a commission.
Denny, as we call him, is a professional. He was clear and concise with his intentions, holding our hand through each step of the plan. He has worked in boroughs all over Pennsylvania, creating comprehensive plans. We like Denny and what he is doing for us.
The downtown commerce area is a point of interest for our borough’s comprehensive plan. This is an area of focus that we want to build and beautify.
We started going through all the businesses in our town. We couldn’t decide which areas to focus the business growth section on.
Denny contracts with other agencies to assist him in areas where he lacks expertise, such as the economic element. Here is where I learned about how our data is collected & then used.
We were given a list of the top 5 businesses that would succeed in our city. The data is based on consumer data in similar cities across the United States, including the surrounding area. The standards for local were 5 miles, 10 miles, and 20 miles from our city. Based on this data, it was decided that a furniture and fine leather goods store would do well in our downtown.
Learning this, our planning commission went ballistic. We let the study analyst know we needed more details on the data they offered. We couldn’t understand how the data from this study showed us what our community wanted from a business perspective. Some of the businesses that were offered did not match our community. A fine leather goods store in rural Pennsylvania does add up.
The study examines how our community spends its money. Credit card records show what was purchased and how far away you went to buy it. I consider this a customer profile. Marketing and business are science that can be graphed and calculated.
That is where the “leakage report” comes into our view. We can pay a bank to run a leakage report for us. They will crunch all of our community data and tell us in further detail the spending habits of our community for the low cost of $20,000. I find this to be a fascinating service that our banks offer. Do you?
See you Next Sunday