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How to explore liveability results in Community Views 

Where to find what your residents value most, and how well they say they experience it locally 

This guide shows you how to view the liveability results on your organisation’s Community Views platform and how to read them, so you can see which parts of local life your community cares about most and which of those they rate poorly.

Note: These results come from a Community Views survey wave, so they describe what people said at the time they were surveyed. The year of the survey wave appears on the topic tile and in the section heading. Both the survey year and the number of residents surveyed differ from one organisation to the next and in some instances, from one question to the next, so check the year shown with any figure you plan to quote.

The Overall Liveability Index (OLI) is Community Views’ headline measure of liveability. It is a single score out of 100, created by combining the importance residents place on 16 liveability attributes with how they rate their experience of those same attributes in their local area. A higher OLI score indicates closer alignment between what residents value and what they experience locally.

A coloured arrow beside a value means the difference from the comparator is statistically significant. Where no arrow appears, the difference may be down to chance.

Steps

  1. Open your organisation's Community Views platform: The landing page is the Headlines and Navigation page. It carries survey topic tiles, each showing an icon, the topic name, and a headline figure.
  2. Open the Values & Experiences topic: Click the ‘Values & Experiences’ topic tile. Alternatively, you can also navigate to this page by clicking the hamburger icon at the top left, then click 'Values & Experiences'. The hamburger menu holds the full survey topic list; the tiles on the landing page link to a subset of survey topics only.
  3. Read the Overall Liveability Index chart: The first chart on the page is your organisation's Overall Liveability Index. A dial shows the score. Beside it, a bar list gives the benchmark comparators (e.g. national and state) with their Overall Liveability Index scores. A plain-language reading of the chart sits directly beneath it, inside the same panel.

Screenshot showing the Overall Liveability Index chart in Community Views

  1. Read the Values & Experiences matrix: Scroll to the Values & Experiences matrix. It is a scatter plot where each of the 16 liveability attributes appear as a labelled dot, colour-coded by the legend beneath: 'Greater Importance & Worse Experiences', 'Greater Importance & Better Experiences' and 'Less important attributes'. Importance runs across the horizontal axis, from 'lesser importance' to 'greater importance'. Experience runs up the vertical axis, from 'worse experiences' to 'better experiences'. Dashed lines mark median importance and average experience.
  2. Scroll to the Importance and Experiences chart: This lists all 16 liveability attributes with an importance percentage and an experience score out of 10, in two columns headed 'Importance' and 'Experience'.
  3. Sort the attribute list: Each of the two columns carries its own 'Sort by' control. Use it to reorder the attributes by importance or by experience. The default is for all 16 attributes to be sorted by descending order of importance.
  4. Apply one comparison: Select one of the three drop-downs above the chart. 'Benchmark' compares your results against a national, state or regional comparator. If the survey has been run previously, each previous survey wave will also appear here to be applied as a comparator. 'Local Area' compares one local area against the overall survey results. 'Demography' compares one demographic group, such as an age group, against the overall survey results. Applying one drop-down resets the other two, so you view a single comparison at a time. The 'Local Area' drop-down applies a comparison to this chart; it is not the same thing as a Local area page, which is a separate page per area reached from the 'Local areas' section of the hamburger menu.
  5. Clear the filter when you’re done: Click the refresh button to the right of the 'Demography' drop-down. The comparison bars disappear and the chart returns to your organisation's overall survey results on their own.

What this tells you

By the end you have four things you can act on.

  • The Overall Liveability Index with its comparators, which places your organisation’s Overall Liveability Index against comparable benchmark results (e.g. national and state), so you can say whether the headline liveability score is a local story or a broader one.
  • The Values & Experiences matrix, which separates the attributes your community rates as important from the rest and shows how well each is experienced, so you can see which attributes need to be maintained and which need to improve to lift liveability.
  • The attribute list in the Importance and Experiences chart, which gives an importance percentage and an experience score out of 10 for every one of the 16 liveability attributes and sorts by either, so you can quote a figure for a specific attribute rather than reading its position off the matrix.
  • One comparison at a time against a benchmark, a local area or a demographic group, so you can test whether a result is consistent across the overall survey results or belongs to a particular place or group.

Troubleshooting

A drop-down I had set has reset itself. The 'Benchmark', 'Local Area' and 'Demography' drop-downs are mutually exclusive. Applying one clears the other two, so only one comparison can be viewed at a time.

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