Neighbourhood shopping strips carry much of the social and economic life of a suburb, yet the evidence a council holds about them is rarely gathered in one place, and it is almost never collected in a way that lets one centre be compared fairly with another. A metropolitan Melbourne council came to this problem with four very different activity centres, close to 600 businesses between them, limited funds and several internal teams each holding a piece of the picture, from streetscape and trader relationships to planning controls. What it needed was not four more reports but one trusted evidence base, and from it a clear, comparable plan for each centre.
POMO was engaged by the council as lead consultant to deliver a Place Vision and Action Plan programme across all four centres, leading the strategy, the analysis and the design of every output. POMO worked alongside Fourfold Studio as engagement partner and RMIT University, which brought a behaviour and culture lens to how the evidence was framed and interpreted. This case study covers three things: how the team listened, how it made sense of what it heard, and how it showed the result back to the people who will use it.
The engagement was designed so that no single group could dominate the picture, which matters on shopping strips where the most frequent voices are not always the most representative ones. An online survey was open to anyone with a view on the four centres, with a dedicated pathway for business owners and operators, while traders were met door to door in their own shopfronts, pop-up sessions were held in the centres themselves, and the public conversation on the council’s own social media channels was read and coded alongside everything else.
Across a survey period of just over six weeks, this produced more than 700 survey responses, more than 280 coded social media comments and more than 50 recorded conversations, together more than 1,000 individual contributions. More than 500 comments and dot votes were also left on pop-up boards, and these are counted separately, because a dot vote is not a person.
Gathering input is only the start, and the harder work, which POMO treats as a discipline in its own right, is turning a large and uneven body of community and business input into evidence that is consistent, traceable and readable by people who are not specialists.
One Master Dataset Every source was brought into a single master dataset with a consistent structure, so that any figure in any output can be traced back to the record it came from. The 29 field survey export was cleaned, text corruption in the open responses was repaired and identifying details were removed, and the final dataset was verified row for row against the source before anything was counted. Demographic fields were collected but deliberately not cross-tabulated, because at these subgroup sizes the results could identify individuals.
One Coding Framework Every comment and conversation was coded against a single theme, sub-theme and sentiment framework developed with RMIT University, so that a remark on a social media post and a conversation on a footpath were measured against the same yardstick, and survey open text was coded into 15 themes drawn from more than 200 substantive responses. The same questions and measures were run for every centre, from ratings of pride and safety to perceived barriers and the challenges business owners face, so the four can be compared directly rather than read as four separate stories.
Cross-centre comparison
Average rating out of 10. Because every centre answered the same questions, the four can be compared directly.
Triangulation over Volume Findings were treated as solid only where they held across independent sources, and where sources disagreed, the disagreement was treated as the finding rather than smoothed away. Parking was the issue most often raised in conversations with traders, yet in the survey of more than 700 people the look and feel of the public space was chosen as a barrier to visiting far more often than parking was, a distinction that matters a great deal for where a council chooses to direct its effort.
Survey result
Selections across all four centres, respondents could choose up to three. n = 1,140.
Triangulation
Share of each source’s coded contributions that raised the theme. A finding is treated as solid only when it holds across sources.
| Survey | Social media | Street conversations | Pop-up boards | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shade and greenery | 46% | 35% | 39% | 28% | ■ Holds in 4 of 4 |
| Footpath condition | 26% | 17% | 31% | 6% | ■ Holds in 3 of 4 |
| Public toilets | 16% | 9% | 5% | 48% | ■ One source only |
| Evening activity | 14% | 41% | 8% | 23% | ■ Sources disagree |
| Places for dogs | 7% | 12% | 4% | 9% | ■ Low in every source |
Evidence Fitted to Each Reader POMO designed a family of outputs, each for a different reader and each in the council’s own brand palette, so the evidence reads as the council’s own. A live dashboard for the project team reads straight from the master dataset, so the picture updates as new data comes in, while a self-contained, plain-language insights page gives wider readers the headline numbers, a card for each centre, a cross-centre comparison and a guide to reading the data, with counts, sample sizes and caveats stated up front. A pre-workshop information pack, concise workshop summaries and a short organisational impact note completed the set.
Plain-language summary
Each card leads with what the evidence says in two or three sentences, then shows the numbers behind it.
Weekends are busy and weekdays are quiet. Shade, trees and better footpaths were raised in every source, by visitors and locals alike.
| Visit mostly on weekends | 81% | |
| Want more shade | 64% | |
| Walk or cycle here | 43% |
Most people arrive on foot from the surrounding streets and stay for a short visit. Public toilets and seating were the most common requests.
| Arrive on foot | 59% | |
| Want public toilets | 52% | |
| Stay over an hour | 18% |
Agreeing Before Writing Two workshops with the council’s internal teams turned the evidence into shared direction, moving the group from four separate reports toward one programme, a strategic overview plus a profile and action plan for each centre, all built on the same method. Before drafting began, a plain-language reverse brief played the brief back to the council so that audiences, purpose and format were agreed in advance, and the actions are being framed in delivery streams, from council-led through to trader-led and community-led, so that the documents enable action rather than commit budget.
The programme is still in progress, so the impact described here is the impact of the evidence work itself rather than of any change on the ground, which it is too early to claim. Engagement and analysis are complete, and the strategic overview and the four centre plans are being drafted for staged review by the council.
Contact POMO to discuss how we can turn your next engagement into evidence your council, your traders and your community can all read and act on.
Read next: Mackay Place Strategy: From Vision & Community Engagement to Activation
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