Research and analysis

Review of local civil society and community data

A review of voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector and community-level datasets, and interviews with VCSE stakeholders and data experts.

Documents

Details

DCMS’ Civil Society and Youth (CSY) directorate commissioned Ipsos UK, the University of the West of Scotland and the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR) to conduct a review of civil society and community data, with a focus on geographical data.

This review aims to enhance CSY’s approach to local data, supporting wider work to identify where local needs are greatest, better target place-based programmes and more accurately assess geographical variation and change over time.

The outputs of the review include a short report presenting insights from an assessment of 45 civil society and community data sources and 17 interviews with data and sector experts; together with a summary of the datasets included in the review.

Updates to this page

Published 11 July 2025

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