Essential Reporting

Essential Reporting

Essential Reporting gives you a quick, high-level view of the workforce on your projects. This article explains how to open the report, choose what it covers, and read the results.

Prefer to watch? Watch the Essential reporting video for a short walkthrough.

Who can use Essential Reporting

Essential Reporting is available to:

  • Funders, e.g. broadcasters
  • Production companies
  • Suppliers

Open Essential Reporting

  1. In the menu at the top of the screen, select Reports.
  2. Select Essential.

The Reports menu, showing the Essential option

Choose what your report covers

At the top of the page is the Report Scope panel. Use it to decide which data the charts show.

The Report Scope panel

Setting

What it does

Period

Set a Start and End date to choose the time period you want to report on.

Project(s)

Choose All Projects, or pick an individual project to see its data on its own.

Benchmarks (optional)

Compare your data against a benchmark: Prior year, Industry or Population.

 

When you are happy with your choices, select Apply. To reset everything and start again, select Clear All.

Choosing All Projects or a single project

Choosing a benchmark

Read the charts

Each chart gives a high-level view of one characteristic, across the projects and period you selected. Charts are grouped into four sections:

  • Demographics
  • Ethnicity
  • Socioeconomic background and education
  • Region

Demographic charts, including Gender and Orientation and gender identity

Tip: For some questions, such as Gender, people could choose more than one answer. Each bar shows the percentage of respondents who chose that answer, so the bars may add up to more than 100%.

Check how reliable the data is

Each chart includes data quality measures, so you can see how much confidence to place in the figures. To see them, hover over a bar. You will see:

  • the percentage for that bar
  • a reliability rating, for example Moderately Reliable Data
  • a range that the true value is 95% likely to fall within

Hovering over a bar shows its reliability and likely range

The reliability rating works like a confidence interval. It takes two things into account:

  • The number of roles on the projects in your report (the population)
  • The number of people who completed the survey on those projects (the sample)

You can see both numbers in the bottom right-hand corner of each chart:

Symbol

Meaning

N (capital)

Population: the total number of roles

n (lower case)

Sample: the number of people who completed the survey

N and n shown in the bottom right-hand corner of a chart

How your data is kept anonymous

All the data in Essential Reporting is anonymised. We use differential privacy and other privacy technologies to do this.

Please note: When numbers are low, we have to hide or blur more of the data to protect people’s anonymity. This means reports based on small numbers of people will be less detailed and less useful. This is reflected in the data reliability rating.


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