Community Informatics & Placemaking
All About The Place
Creating a shared language for community progress
All About The Place uses the Social Value Engine to measure community-led placemaking across four Devon geographies commissioned by NHS Devon and Devon Public Health, helping local partners evidence progress that is often difficult to capture through traditional datasets alone.
All About The Place is delivering community informatics and placemaking support across four contrasting Devon geographies, commissioned jointly by NHS Devon and Devon Public Health. The Social Value Engine provides a way to evidence early community-led progress and connect local action to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, helping communities and partners demonstrate how local change contributes to wider social, economic and environmental outcomes.
All About The Place was founded to help bridge different ways of understanding communities. Public sector organisations often bring public health data, evidence and strategic insight, while VCSE organisations contribute local knowledge, trusted relationships and lived experience. Although both are working towards the same outcomes, they frequently describe places and progress in different ways. Deprivation and poverty are useful indicators for understanding where additional challenges may be concentrated, but communities themselves often describe their experiences in terms of strengths, aspirations and opportunities. All About The Place helps translate between these perspectives and, importantly, helps demonstrate what progress looks like as it starts to emerge.
"It enables us to have a much faster conversation with stakeholders."
Paul White
Founder, All About The Place
The challenge
Devon's health inequalities work required learning from four very different places. NHS Devon and Devon Public Health commissioned All About The Place to work in Littleham in Exmouth, representing a coastal town; Wonford in Exeter, an inner-city area; three villages along the A30 at Tedburn St Mary, Cheriton Bishop and Pathfinder Village, representing a rural context; and West Exe in Tiverton, a market town estate. The intention was to understand the distinct strengths, opportunities and challenges within each community.
Each community started from a different position. Littleham benefited from an active community built through earlier quiet voice animation work by partner organisation Interwoven. Wonford had a longstanding community organisations group with strong relationships and local knowledge. The A30 villages developed momentum at a different pace, reflecting the character of a more rural setting. West Exe had an established wellbeing alliance which provides an important foundation, while more frequent engagement helped build momentum in the early stages.
Across all four places, residents were making progress through practical, community-led activity. However, much of that progress was difficult to capture through conventional measures. Without a way to evidence these smaller but important steps forward, it could be challenging to demonstrate the value being created locally or to build a robust case for future investment and support.
There was also a broader challenge around aligning community priorities with available resources. Public sector partners must balance community aspirations with finite budgets and competing demands. In Paul White's experience, when communities understand these realities, they are often highly effective at identifying priorities, seeking additional resources and contributing their own assets alongside public investment.
The solution
All About The Place reviewed a range of measurement approaches before selecting the Social Value Engine. Two features were particularly important.
The first was reach. By mapping outcomes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the platform enables many small changes emerging across different communities to be brought together into a broader picture of contribution to global goals. For Paul White, social, economic and environmental outcomes are interconnected, making it important to understand progress through a holistic lens. Alignment with the SDGs also creates opportunities to connect local placemaking activity with wider conversations about sustainability, resilience and long-term change.
The second was usability. While several options relied heavily on spreadsheet-based methods, All About The Place was looking for an approach that community groups could continue to use independently. The organisation's aim is to build local capability and then step back, enabling communities to continue their own development journey. The Social Value Engine supported that ambition by providing a platform that community groups could adopt and manage themselves.
Key outcomes
Closing summary
The experience across Littleham, Wonford, the A30 villages and Westexe demonstrates that meaningful change often begins with small, locally led actions. By providing a practical way to capture and communicate that progress, the Social Value Engine has helped communities and partners build a shared understanding of what is working, where momentum is growing and how local activity contributes to wider social, economic and environmental goals. In doing so, it supports a more collaborative approach to placemaking, where communities, commissioners and local organisations can work together to shape positive long-term outcomes.
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