We’re excited to announce a big upcoming update for Vision on Monday, the 28th of April, at 8 pm UK time. All services, including Vision and Find Your Nearest, will be unavailable during the update. We estimate the system will be offline for 3 hours, and we appreciate your patience and support during this time. We will be in touch to let you know when the system and its features are back online.
With this update, you can find your competitors, potential customers, or even your next potential venue using our new Points of Interest (POI) feature. Search via a selection of categories and/or free text and then display them as individual pins on the map. Furthermore, they will appear as demographics against your Postcodes, ZCTAs, and territories. Further...Furthermore, you will also be able to export a list of the POIs within your territories.
Whether you want to see a range of businesses within categories such as “Restaurants” or “Electronics Stores” or for specific brands within them, such as “Nandos” or “CeX”, Vision's new POIs can give you precisely what you need. This allows you to factor potential locations and complementary or competitive businesses into your territory decisions.
We’ve also improved some other system parts alongside adding the POI feature. Firstly, we’ve redesigned Searching to integrate Points of Interest. It now allows you to choose whether you want to perform a search on your data or a POI collection. When searching for your data, it will now attempt to best fit the results to the map.
Secondly, when downloading or exporting an individual territory or area, you now have the choice of file (now Excel and not CSV) or copying the data to your clipboard for pasting wherever you need it. The new options are exporting a list of POIs within the territory or a list of Postcodes or Zip Codes that make up a territory. The demographic breakdown works the same as before, but will include any POI collections.
The latest Postcode, Ward and Local Authority boundaries are available in the upcoming update.
There are no new or removed Postcodes to manage in this release. However, there have been some minor boundary changes across Scotland. These appear to be where the boundaries have been improved and made more accurate. This will result in some minor demographic shifts but should have a minimal impact on territories overall.
For any of our clients using Wards or Local Authorities, we’ll need to help you update to the latest version of those boundaries. This is because of the substantial changes made to Ward boundaries across releases. It’s important to stay up to date to receive the latest demographics, so please get in touch if you’d like to update those layers.
The usual datasets are being updated. These include:
The locations and demographics for all nurseries in the UK will soon be available in Vision and added as part of the Buzz Education data pack. Subscribing to that additional data pack will give you access to all school and nursery locations and demographics.
Despite releasing the POI feature, which will allow users to access those businesses, this pack still contains the most accurate and high-quality data. It also has supplementary information on the schools and nurseries not covered by the POI feature and is regularly verified by Buzz Education.
If you missed it, Sonar is now available in Northern Ireland! If you want to add it to your subscription, please get in touch.
We’ve recently received an update from our supplier that we should receive the Scottish Sonar data next month. Once we have it, we’ll process it and have it ready as part of the standard Sonar package.
If you have any questions or ideas you want to see in Vision, please let us know; we'd love to hear them!