Business Improvement Districts & Town Centre Management Database Solutions

A report prepared for the GLA and published by Shared Intelligence and the Association of Town & City Management on  London’s Business Improvement Districts identified that a BID:

‘must establish good communication structures with local businesses which can be maintained over time. The quality of a BID business database is therefore key’

And that when setting up a new BID:

‘The process will need to start by developing a good, accurate database of businesses, identifying voters and starting to engage them’


The challenge…

A BID database, or Business Improvement District database, may need to hold information on a variety of BID stakeholders. This includes Ratepayers, Owners, Occupiers, Voters, Building and Property Management teams and Premises or Hereditament related information will also need to include the property reference number and property type such as office, shop, kiosk, office or market stall, maybe using VOA codes, the billing reference from the local rating authority and its rateable value along with the Levy rules and calculations.

When it comes to ballot time you will need to keep accurate records on who has received ballot papers and when, and the attitude of Voters to the BID or voting propensity. You may also need to consider how the database will differ between BID start up and then onto BID delivery

The actual level of information that is required will be dependant on the specific requirements for each BID and some are more detailed than others.

When it comes to stakeholders you might also want to identify whether they are Board Members, what their interests and responsibilities are and if they are members of focus steering groups or media contacts etc, etc.

Each contact may have multiple points of contact including landlines, mobiles, security pagers and email addresses,

You might want multiple databases to include tourist information and competition entrants for future marketing.

Our solutions…

We have implemented, configured and helped maintain the data in many Act! BID databases for a number of clients, they have all been different. Some solutions have been hereditament ‘centric’ others have been levy payer or contact ‘centric’. We have also assisted clients with integrated email marketing to provide a focussed marketing effort to attract more business into the BID area. 

Using the additional ‘custom table’ functionality within Act! and an additional reporting module we were able to setup an Act! database to manage six separate BIDs for both Owners and Occupiers

The benefits…

Because of its flexibility and ease of customisation Act! is perfect to support a changing environment. We know that the work we carried out for one of our clients on their Act! database was instrumental in them renewing their BID, we can use this expertise and experience to help you.

If you require advice on setting up a BID database then please contact us.


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