Using AI to derive social media insights, in Greater Cambridge
Discover how social media data was used to inform the communications and digital planning strategy for Greater Cambridge Shared Planning
The Future Fox were selected by Greater Cambridge Partnership (South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridge City Council) to understand if social media and other 'wild' data sources could reveal robust insight into community preferences, and help create a richer data picture to help with decision making around the Local Plan. This is one of the thirteen projects funded by the Government's PropTech Engagement Fund (Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities), and support the digitalisation and step-up in accessibility of the planning system.
The objective
Working with the GCSP, the objective was to understand what the residents of South Cambridgeshire and Cambridge City were talking about on social media relating to local issues relevant to the Joint Local Plan. This would help incorporate insights from people who may not have responded to the prior consultation.
The solution
The Future Fox’s PlaceBuilder dashboard captured location-specific tweets from the local residents, adhering to GDPR and used cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify the themes and trends within the data.
More than 2m local tweets over a 12-month period were analysed by the platform, with the dashboard showing a sentiment heatmap of the tweets as well as the frequency of those tweets for a particular location on the map.
In addition, the dashboard also has charts showing average public sentiment on specific topics and locations and how they evolved over time.
The impact on strategy
The Council were able to use the dashboard insights to:
a) Identify key problem areas related to local planning, public spaces and council decisions, outside of formal consultation
b) Detect announcements the public respond to the most, to inform communications plans
c) See how these topics and sentiments (attitude) change over time, in relation to council actions or external events, and by ward or parish
The strategy team could use these insights to assist with targeted messaging and improve how they communicate with their communities about the Local Plan.