AMT Public

amt-i (Action for Market Towns research and consultancy arm) has delivered training in the innovative Welland Town Benchmarking package for 18 market towns in Derbyshire.

The towns innovatively engaged with tourism students from the University of Derby to gain the required information for the scheme including:

• Visitor Surveys
• Car Parking Usage Data
• Commercial Units

Normally, the data would be gathered and entered by town partnerships, towns councils and local government officials, but by working with their local university the Derbyshire market towns have both saved valuable time and offered practical tourism experience to undergraduates.

The Town Benchmarking package, which was developed by a consortium of 14 Welland market towns,  is an on-line system which allows organisations and partnerships to record, collate and analyse valuable information on 12 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) concerning their town centre. These KPIs include;

• Footfall counts
• Visitor satisfaction
• Car park availability and usage
• Total number of commercial units.

The benefits of benchmarking include:

• Helping partnerships address the real issues of how to develop thriving communities using a well-defined evidence base.
• Offering vital data when applying for project funding
• Allowing year-on-year comparisons to be made, supplying a measurement of improvement.
• Providing the opportunity for towns to compare their results against the regional and national figures.

There is great potential for the benchmarking system and there has been a big increase in the number of localities to have signed up to the system in the last year.

For more details of how your town could benefit from the Town Benchmarking package, please contact Mike King at mike.king@towns.org.uk