It has long been recognised that the performance of towns and cities can and ideally should be measured by reference to a range of indicators, for example number of customers, retail sales, volume of cars, customer profile, catchment area, tenant mix and vacancy rates. However, difficulties associated with the cost, availability and ease of collation and reporting of many measures has meant that footfall monitoring has remained the focus of performance measurement of town and city centres.

The importance of footfall in measuring a town's performance should not be under-estimated - via automated monitoring, it remains the most available, cost effective and dynamic measure of a town's performance. However, it is also increasingly recognised that this is only one element of a town centre's performance that needs to be examined as managers need to understand both the drivers and the outcomes of a town's performance - and these include such issues such as the type of customer a town is attracting, the extent to which customer numbers are being converted into turnover and patterns of activity within a town centre.

In an ideal world in the absence of any other performance measure, at the very minimum, footfall would be overlaid with retail sales data to determine the success of a town in converting customer visits into retail turnover. However, the historic reluctance of retailers to share trading information left the proxy measure of footfall as being the key indicator of a town's overall trading performance. More recently, though, retailers themselves have been acknowledging that more effective performance measurement can be achieved by pooling their own sales data with that of other retailers in the same town. And at the same time, it has also become easier - and more cost effective - to collate other performance measures such as car parking volumes, customer profile and catchment area.

What has still been lacking, however, is an effective platform for collating, analysing and disseminating performance information to traders and stakeholders in a town centre. For example, in a typical month, performance measurement that encompasses four separate measures necessitates the collation of a dataset with over 10,000 separate inputs - and all of these inputs have to be completed accurately and delivered on time in an appropriate format. The lack of budget and resource that is common amongst most Town Centre Managers has meant that even though there may be a clear appetite for an holistic approach to measuring a town's performance, it is just not viable.

With this in mind, Springboard is developing its PerForm service, an online data collation and reporting tool that encompasses any number of key performance measures from a wide range of sources.

Data can be collated either electronically or using online forms, and is highly secure and confidentially recorded. Trends in each measure, relationships between different performance measures and overall performance trends can be reported on in bespoke or standardised formats.

Through its online data collation and reporting capability, PerForm will provide managers of towns and cities of any size the ability to understand their performance fully, and to communicate this effectively to traders and stakeholders.