CASE STUDY 3
Vulnerability Visualisation Tool
A roadmap to real social change
Case study: Vulnerability Visualisation Tool
- Project reference: NIA_NGN_422
- Project partner: Egnida Innovation
- Project status: Complete
- Overall project value: £129,360.00
- Innovation theme: Data and digitalisation
INNOVATION THEME:
A roadmap to real social change
Following its inception in 2021, the NGN Vulnerability Visualisation Tool has continued to go from strength to strength thanks to funding from the NIA, and is now used far and wide as a single point of contact for vulnerability data in the UK.
Through our intricate online map of vulnerable customers – where they’re located, what challenges they face, what services they have access to - we’ve been able to get to grips with different communities’ needs like never before. That’s allowed us to tailor our services and products to suit them better, creating meaningful social change as a result.
Phase two of our intuitive Vulnerability Visualisation Tool has been about making it more widely available to partners and charities, so they too can use the data for doing good. We’ve seen an extraordinary increase in the tool’s usage across the energy sector and beyond this year, and our mission to continue its development, bring in more partners, add to the amount of data available in the system, and start creating machine learning models on the map is now complete.
Steve Dacre Innovation Vulnerability Lead at NGN
“During phase 2, we’ve made huge progress with the technicalities of the tool, which has in turn, made our care for vulnerable customers even more effective. We have helped to identify areas with the highest need for fuel poverty intervention, for example, and used the data to inform a number of future energy planning projects. There are infinite combinations of data which will each tell a story about customer vulnerability in a given area, providing a single version of truth when it comes to the health and needs of the population we serve.”
A key development on the project in this period has been our partnership with Google. Demand for the tool has been so high, we needed more user capacity and to be able to host and share even more data in a GDPR-compliant way. We moved the entire application over to Google’s Cloud Platform, which has given us all the power of Google’s security models, together with their incredibly fast data storage and data exchange platform. The result is a best-in-class data sharing and access platform powering the visualisation tool.
Phase 2 has seen a massive leap forward in both the technical abilities of the tool and the potential that it now offers for collaboration and insights. Phase 3 will be about taking this further, using machine learning and generative AI to make interacting with the data and the tool even easier.
Key benefits:
- One central source of truth - avoids duplication of effort across the industry and results in better data alignment
- Over 100 datasets and counting - pulling information about health, education, environment, energy, finance and local services, which can be overlaid to create a compelling case for supporting vulnerable people
- Easy to use and adopt - overlaying datasets at the touch of a button to build a picture of social issues experienced across regions, and instant visualisations to target vulnerability budgets far more effectively
- Quicker, better, more targeted support for vulnerable customers and their different needs
- Free for communities and third sector organisations to use to improve their services
