The Thrive Indicators

Our Thrive Scores are a simple yet straight to the heart of the matter insight into how we feel we are faring as individuals and how we reflect on our communities as a whole.

They have been designed to capture the current  mood and so will provide an interesting barometer of how well we bounce back from the pressures  and uncertainties of the pandemic and lockdown.

The scoring system is pretty intuitive, a score of 0 means we’re at rock bottom and at 100 we’re knocking it out of the park every time. All survey participants had an equally-weighted vote, choosing between five levels of thriving for themselves and  for their communities.

We will be updating and publishing these scores quarterly to understand the changes being experienced as we come out of lockdown and start to get back to a less restricted way of life. It’s too early at the moment to confidently say what the benchmark score is for people or communities to  be thriving overall, but we think that 65 and above will be around the mark.

Are we currently thriving?

The good news is that the dial has moved in the right direction since Survey 1, with our individual Thrive Score up three points from 41 to 44. This represents a drop in the number of us saying we are rarely or never thriving from 45% to 37%, but there is still a lot of room for improvement as only 20% of us say we are thriving a majority of the time.

And while both men and women are both thriving more, it’s the women who have made the bigger jump quarter to quarter to now have a higher thrive score than their male counterparts. All age groups are thriving more, but the youngsters and middle-aged are feeling it more than the older amongst us, but to be fair the more mature amongst us were doing better in the first place. Part-time workers have felt an increase twice that of the rest of us, surely representing the return of many to work following the easing of restrictions. And as schools have gone back, it’s the pre-school and primary school parents that are celebrating much more than others.

Are our communities currently thriving?

As opposed to the positive shift in our individual thriving score, the state of our community thrive levels remains unchanged from  Survey 1 with a score of 60.

The good news here is the score was decent first time around considering we were setting an initial benchmark of 65 for overall thriving. Secondly, things of greater mass are harder to shift and a community being a sum of its parts is of course just that, so we would expect less variation in this than with the score for ourselves as individuals.

When we look at the underlying thinking around our community’s ability to currently thrive, its amenities, location and people are the top three factor in positively affecting that view. In terms of the detracting factors, it’s the lack of services and diversity that are driving negative opinion. Its design and history have the greatest levels of ambivalence with approximately half of us believing they have  no impact.

Watch our webinar “how the spaces and places we inhabit affect our ability to thrive”, in conjunction with the BPF here.