Community Lens - 2025
Match open datasets to the areas you work in to learn more about the needs of local communities.
The Community Lens tool allows you to plot your postcodes over the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), the official measure of deprivation in England, comprised of seven distinct domains of deprivation, Income Deprivation, Employment Deprivation, Education, Skills and Training Deprivation, Health Deprivation and Disability, Crime, Barriers to Housing and Services, Living Environment Deprivation.
Why do we have a 2025 and 2019 version of Community Lens?
The Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) are typically released every 5-6 years. This version of the Community Lens tool uses the IMD data released in 2025. If you would like to compare to the 2019 data, you can access the 2019 version of the Community Lens here:
Community Lens 2019How does it work?
1. Copy and paste your data
Community Lens works with copy-and-pasted postcodes from other applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets, TextEdit). Each postcode should be on a new line.
Your data is safe.
Even though Community Lens is a web app, the data you insert will be processed only by the web browser. No server-side operations or storages are performed, no one will see, touch or copy your data!
2. Choose the topic you are interested in.
We designed and developed Community Lens with social impact organisations in mind. That’s why we focused on providing open data sets which you can easily select to understand the communities you serve better. Is there an open dataset you would like to see added? Write to us here.
3. Explore your data and the topic of interest
Understand how your data maps to the topic of interest. Do you want to view a different topic ? Do you want to explore something else? Add new information to your dataset or select a different topic of interest.
To compare different areas, take screenshots and place them side by side next to each other.
