Collection, evaluation and interpretation - painting a picture of Park Royal’s commercial participants

Challenge 

With over 2,000 businesses covering a large area of West London in the highly complex Park Royal industrial estate, it was vital for OPDC to collect and interpret data to understand and map businesses within the zone.

The overall objectives were to assess changes in the area over the past few years, drive strategic decision making to help bolster economic activity, better understand and engage with the business community and provide evidence to support government funding bids.

Response 

Our response was two-fold - human interaction and technology combined. We first designed a survey for the collection of business data together with an implementation plan, whilst creating an engagement plan for ongoing stakeholder engagement.

With our partner AKOU, we deployed a community engagement team of 10 working in tandem with 10 OPDC staff, who surveyed and visited 1,500 of the businesses in Park Royal over four weeks. Data was collected digitally via a bespoke platform developed with AKOU. This allowed for real-time updates and easy analysis of business data for OPDC.

Data collected ranged from information around business type, size and activity to future space requirements and concerns, giving vital insights into being a commercial occupier of Park Royal.

Impact

The result was a bespoke platform listing all Park Royal businesses, their details and data collected from the surveys. Analysis was then undertaken and presented to the CEO and senior team. This revealed important insights including business concerns, demands and infrastructure requirements.

These insights are being used to plan infrastructure, support government funding bids and to keep occupiers within Park Royal.

For the communications and engagement team, areas of concern and key contacts were revealed, to allow for the development of working groups and targeted future communication and engagement activity.