Burnley Council: Engaging local people to inform a Long-Term Plan

Burnley is one of 55 UK towns included in the government’s ‘Long-Term Plan for Towns.’ Over the next ten years, the town will receive £20 million of ‘endowment-style’ funding to spend on local people’s priorities such as regenerating the town centre and high streets, securing public safety and improving transport.

We worked with Burnley Council’s Economy and Development team to engage local people and get their views on how the money should be spent.

Our research was used to help decision-makers develop a plan for short-term improvements and long-term transformation in Burnley. 

Our role

• Consultation
• Public engagement
• Survey design
• Data analysis
• Report writing

Why PS Research?

Burnley Council were working on a tight timescale. A newly formed Burnley Town Board (a decision-making body for the funding) had a short window to submit its Long-Term Plan to the government.

When time’s against you, it helps to have a safe pair of hands. We were a couple of researchers they could trust for a few reasons: 

1. We’d previously worked with Burnley Council on resident and staff surveys to help shape its services. They knew they were getting a team that could engage different groups of people and produce meaningful insights. 

2.  We have experience leading research for local authorities and an understanding of the sector. Plus, Adam’s research and evaluation background in local government roles means we get the complexities—timescales, budgets, technologies, bottlenecks and the rest.

3. We’re local. Lancashire through and through, accents and all. Our knowledge of Burnley meant we could get up and running quickly and fit in easily with the council’s team.

These things combined helped us work pragmatically and flexibly (always important on local government projects) to provide public feedback and deliver valuable data for the Long-Term Plan.

A varied approach for better engagement

As said, time wasn’t on our side here. Our first job was to help the council’s Economy and Development team come up with the best approach for wide-ranging engagement achievable in five weeks.

To give as many local people as possible the opportunity to share their thoughts on the town and how they would invest the funding, we opted for an online survey and a range of in-person activities, based on survey questions.

Creating a survey people want to take

Surveys are our bread and butter. We’ve used them to collect data for clients on everything from museums to employment.

A big factor in us being able to use them effectively is understanding that…

Most people don’t like taking surveys.

They can often feel too long, irrelevant, poorly designed or a waste of time.

Our remit was to come up with a survey that doesn’t feel like a survey. There’s a skill to doing this well that we’ve learned over time (with a lot of trial and error).

In this case, we got creative with questions, using rating scales alongside projective techniques to keep people engaged while encouraging them to share their thoughts.

For example, rather than ask a stock question like ‘what you like/dislike?’, we asked participants to respond to questions from a friend thinking about moving to Burnley.

Reframing questions helps people think more intentionally about their answers. The results make for better data and more useful insights.

Here are some photos of people's ‘happy places’ that made it into the final report:

Asking respondents to share (or describe) an image helped us understand the kinds of spaces that are important to them, without listing options and asking them to choose.    

To ensure we had a range of perspectives across a spread of age groups and localities, the council and its partners promoted the survey on multiple channels:

• Partner social media accounts
• Emails to partners, community contacts, businesses, event attendees and internal stakeholders
• Articles in local news publications
• Digital boards and posters in public spaces

Over five weeks, we collected close to 1,000 survey responses, giving us a good chunk of data to work with. The rest of our insights came from pop-up events.

Engaging people through activity

For all our work making surveys creative, we get that some people simply aren’t going to respond. So we always look at different ways to engage them. Sometimes that’s through interviews or focus groups. In this case, we supported the council with seven events at different pop-up venues in the town, from a Community Iftar at Burnley Football Club, to a stand at the Artisan Market.

As well as reaching visitors to the town, younger and older people and those from ethnic minority groups who might not have taken the survey, events gave respondents a chance to engage further and chat about the Long-Term Plan.

Together with the client, we created a range of activities to encourage people to interact with questions used in the survey.

These included:

• A 'voting' activity on the three investment themes (safety and security, high streets heritage and regeneration, transport and connectivity) using ping-pong balls
• Sticky dots to rate Burnley as a place to live, work and visit
• Asking people how they would describe Burnley in three words
• Asking people what they would like to see stay and change in ten years' time 

889 people engaged with activities across the council’s events, proving our theory that people enjoy things with ping-pong balls and sticky dots. And giving us even more feedback to influence Burnley’s Long-Term Plan.  

Turning data into insights

Our data analysis primarily focused on survey feedback.

A strong sample size and range of questions meant we could run detailed analysis, cutting data by demographics (age, gender, etc.) and locality (using postcodes) to pinpoint issues affecting different communities.

To dig deeper into survey responses and quantify open-text feedback, we used thematic analysis to code comments into themes. This helped bring context to the data, which was complemented by the research from pop-up events.

We found that community feedback was consistent with what we’d learned from the survey, strengthening our insights for each key theme.

But strong insights mean nothing if you can’t communicate them.

To help the Burnley Town Board understand what matters to people in the local area, we brought everything together in an engaging report.

This included:

• A summary of the Burnley Long-Term Plan and key findings
• An overview of the initial engagement strategy
• Details of respondent demographics and areas covered
• General feedback on Burnley
• Detailed findings on each key theme

All made easily digestible with informative headlines, charts, icons, bullet points and quotes.

Design is something we spend a lot of time thinking about. The quicker readers can understand what the data means and why it’s important, the easier it is for you to get buy-in.

Take a look at the full report.

Shaping the long-term future of Burnley

Engaging nearly 2,000 in just over a month and reporting on it is a big challenge. The fact we managed it (in good time) shows what’s possible with know-how, experience and strong collaboration — working with clients as part of their team, rather than for them as a standoff agency.

Our wide-ranging engagement gave Burnley Council solid insights on issues and priorities important to local people.

Presenting the findings to Burnley Town Board helped shape their thinking to develop a clear plan for how it will use funding to transform the town.

We went on to do the same for Wigan Council, working on the Leigh Long-Term Plan with a consultancy that helped develop the Burnley Long-Term Plan (and watched our presentation). Proof we’re doing something right.

We’re excited to see how the funding is used in both towns over the next decade.