Is #KindnessByPost succeeding as a universal intervention in terms of deprivation? A dive into the data
Leonel Carrasco Baltazar is an economist based in Mexico City, Mexico
I recently had the opportunity to volunteer with the Mental Health Collective, helping them to uncover new insights about their #KindnessByPost initiative; the UK’s leading random acts of kindness exchange. It works like a great big secret Santa where members of the public sign up to send a card or letter with a message of goodwill to someone they don’t know, and have a person allocated to send a card or letter to them.
Almost 11,000 people have taken part in #KindnessByPost so far, with participants from all around England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In the heat map below, we can visualize the concentration of participants based on where they live. We can see that it truly is a UK-wide initiative, reaching all corners of the UK, from the southernmost to the northernmost parts. Whilst there is reach across all four nations, participation is particularly strong in England and Northern Ireland, with opportunities for growth in Scotland and Wales.
Seeking to better understand the reach of the initiative and the participants that have taken part in the 10 events (exchanges) of #KindnessByPost since its launch in 2019 so far. I set out to analyse the levels of deprivation by comparing anonymised postcode data from participations with official national statistics. For the purpose of this investigation, I used the English Index of Multiple Deprivation (year 2019), Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (year 2020), Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (year 2019) and Northern Ireland Multiple Deprivation Measure (year 2017).
Indices of multiple deprivation (IMD) are widely-used datasets within the UK to classify the relative deprivation (essentially a measure of poverty) of small areas. Multiple components of deprivation are weighted with different strengths and compiled into a single score of deprivation. IMDs are an improvement over simpler measures of deprivation such as low average household disposable income because they capture variables such as Employment, Education, Health, Crime, Barriers to Housing and Services and Living Environment.
To make a functional fit between the anonymised #KindnessByPost participant postcode data and the IMD data, we first need to use as an intermediate step; first matching postcodes to the Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOA) which are a way of organising areas in the UK designed to improve the reporting of small area statistics (because LSOAs are a standardised measure developed by the government, it’s much easier to match LSOA codes to other government datasets such as the Index of Multiple Deprivation).
Once postcodes are linked with LSOA codes, these, in turn, can be linked to the IMD data. LSOA areas are split evenly into 10 deciles in the IMD index (Decile 1 being the top 10% most deprived areas, and Decile 10 being the top 10% of least deprived areas).
Because the areas are divided into 10 deprivation categories, seeing 10% of participants in each category when we analyse the data would equate to an even spread of representation, reaching people from all walks of life (in terms of deprivation) evenly.
By counting LSOA codes from over 11,000 individual participations in #KindnessByPost, we can see in the pie chart below that although the two most deprived deciles are slightly underrepresented, participants come from a broadly even spread of the UK in terms of deprivation:
This means that if you´re taking part in #KindnessByPost and receive a card or are matched to send a card to someone, you shouldn’t assume that they are “privileged” or “underprivileged”: People from all backgrounds take part, and the odds of your match coming from each different level of deprivation are roughly the same.
Another way to explore this data that eliminates multiple counting of participants from the same household / same participants taking part in multiple exchanges, is by looking at the level of coverage #KindnessByPost has for unique LSOAs. This is a way of finding out what percentage of the approximately 400 areas in each of the 10 deprivation deciles #KindnessByPost is reaching.
Counting the different LSOAs that participate in #KindnessByPost we see a similar result as in the previous pie chart, there is slightly less coverage for the two most deprived areas and this is an area for future growth for the #KindnessByPost project. However once again the difference is small and there is no systematic skew. There is some variation but the overall distribution across the 10 deprivation deciles is fairly even.
The conclusion of this exploratory study is that #KindnessByPost is broadly succeeding as a universal intervention in terms of deprivation. Whilst there are opportunities for future growth in Scotland and Wales, the initiative has strong coverage across different areas of the UK (as shown on the map), and a reasonably even distribution of participants in terms of deprivation levels (as shown in the pie chart and bar chart).
