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The Best Data Sources To Use For Digital PR Campaigns
When it comes to crafting a successful digital PR campaign, you want to ensure that you are not only delivering engaging, fresh information and insights to readers and journalists, but also that you are staying on the right side of the law. The secret behind these two things is finding authoritative, interesting and recent data that is fit for commercial use. However, it is not as simple as it sounds, and this can often be a challenge to source.
Despite this, the vast range of benefits of using data within your campaign makes finding it well worth the effort. To support you in identifying, sourcing, and analysing the right kinds of data, we have pooled together our favourite go-to data sources for Digital PR campaigns, for a variety of different topics and clients.
Reboot’s top data sources for Digital PR campaigns
General data sources
Office for National Statistics
The Office for National Statistics, better known as ONS, is the UK’s largest independent provider of official and recognised statistics. ONS also has a release calendar for their various research topics, allowing you to make use of the data as soon as it is released.
Statista
Statista provides insights, facts and data from across 170 industries and 150 countries, which is trusted by over 23,000 companies. It is worth noting, however, that a free account will only provide access to basic statistics which you can download, but a paid single or corporate account will give more access and use rights. Don’t let that stop you from using Statista’s vast range of insights to inspire your campaigns, though!
YouGov
YouGov data is typically used to reflect and report the UK’s opinion and feelings towards topics of all kinds, including but not limited to lifestyle, entertainment, politics, and technology.
World Bank Open Data
World Bank Open Data is a free and open resource providing access to global development data, with figures relating to agricultural and rural development, climate change, economy, energy, health, gender, and technology.
London Datastore
London Datastore is a free and open data source that delivers information about the capital to everyone. The data covers employment, the environment, communities, housing, and transport.
Eurostat
A resource containing various, core European datasets and statistics. You can often find data pertaining to the economy, population, technology and transport on Eurostat.
What Do They Know / Ask EU
What Do They Know and Ask EU are sites which enable you to browse and find freedom of information requests which have already been fulfilled and allow you to make new ones.
Open Government data sources
Data.gov.uk
A source of the UK government’s open data. You can find data which is published by different departments, bodies, agencies, and authorities within the government here.
There is also a similar database for the US government’s open data and the Australian government’s open data.
Online search & social media data sources
Google Trends
Google Trends’ data sourcing tool is used to analyse how popular certain search queries and topics are within different jurisdictions, languages, and sectors.
Ahrefs
One of the most important digital marketing tools to have within your toolkit, Ahrefs is full of data to analyse, not only for sourcing search volumes for digital PR campaigns but also for other forms of online marketing, such as SEO and content marketing.
As one of the most popular sites for discussion, Reddit is a great place to source data for your digital PR campaigns - particularly for sentiment analysis.
Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter
Although seemingly simple and accessible to all, Instagram hosts a lot of data that can prove useful in your digital PR campaign, from hashtags to check-ins and sentiment analysis.
Likewise, you can gauge the popularity of certain locations by using Facebook scraped data, or find the most prevalent trends by scraping data from Pinterest. You can also analyse Tweets available and the language used about certain celebrities and public figures through sites like Twitter to see how they are received by users.
Finance and economy data sources
Google Finance
Google Finance supplies live stock market information, including an insight into the popularity and value of various cryptocurrencies, which are often very topical. What’s more, Google Finance has up to date currency conversions and a stream of recent financial news.
Bank of England Statistical Interactive Database
The Bank of England’s website has a statistics area that offers detailed and complex monetary and financial data in both Excel and interactive form. These include data on gold, banknotes, exchange rates, money, lending, and credit.
Yahoo Finance
Like Google Finance, Yahoo Finance provides details on live investment information, currencies, cryptocurrencies and the most active stocks. It gives you a real-time summary of specific stocks and markets which you can compare on the same screen.
Travel and tourism data sources
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor provides a deep pool of data and information about various destinations across the world and the UK, making it a handy resource for travel, property and lifestyle campaigns. It can also be a great place to scrape information, such as reviews and the number of top-rated restaurants, hotels, attractions, and experiences within a local area.
Search The World
Search The World offers statistics on the population, weather, demographics, land area, mortality, life expectancy, growth rates, and travel around the world.
Visit Britain
As the official tourism website for Great Britain, Visit Britain has statistics and information about various aspects of British tourism, but also provides details of how tourism contributes to the economy.
Yelp Open Datasets
Yelp Open Datasets is home to millions of reviews, with ratings and information on hundreds of thousands of businesses. It covers things like parking, availability, and opening hours.
Crime data sources
Data.police.uk
Data.police.uk is an open resource providing crime and policing data in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The data covers everything from the levels of street-level crime to stop and search data for different areas.
UKCrimeStats
UKCrimeStats is one of the most reliable databases for statistics relating to crime. The site also hosts a postcode tool that enables you to analyse the crime rates and types in various different locations.
Employment and career data sources
Glassdoor
Glassdoor is a quick and easy resource where you can identify the ratings given to companies for different aspects and compare the salaries of different companies and industries.
Media and entertainment data sources 
BFI Film Forever
BFI produces and releases free official statistics relating to the UK film industry, with figures such as grossing numbers and information relating to culture.
IMDB Datasets
IMDb is an online database of information relating to films, TV series, online content, and video games, with insight into the cast, production crew, ratings and reviews of all of these works.
Environment and climate data sources 
National Centers For Environmental Information
The National Centers for Environmental Information, formerly known as the National Climatic Data Center, is the global provider for weather and climate-based datasets. It covers marine, weather, and land-based data types, along with other types of datasets.
Met Office
The Met Office provides insightful data about the weather from each observing station in the UK, covering information such as monthly rainfall, temperatures, sunshine duration, and weather variables, such as frost for example.
LondonAir
LondonAir hosts various data relating to the levels of pollution and air quality right across London. The variables that can be measured include temperature, solar radiation, carbon monoxide, wind speed, wind direction, and plenty of other indicators that may prove useful for your campaign.
Property data sources
UK House Price Index
Based on information sources from HM Land Registry, the UK House Price Index uses and analyses house sales data, prices, and transaction details.
Zoopla
Zoopla is an excellent resource if you are looking to find live price valuations for properties via their postcode. It is also a really useful tool for determining the house price trends within different regions.
Rightmove
RightMove delivers data from their internal research, Land Registry records, and the Registers of Scotland to provide an in-depth overview of property pricing across the UK.
Global Property Guide
The Global Property Guide is designed for residential property investors who are seeking information about purchasing property in other countries, since it hosts information about house price indices in a wide range of countries. However, it is a great source of information for any property-specific clients and campaigns with a global, opposed to a national focus.
The Royal Family data sources 
Royal.uk
Unfamiliar to many, Royal.uk contains plenty of data about the royal engagements attended by various members of the Royal Family, along with information about the charities and patronages that they support.
If you want to find out more about how we can leverage data to curate content and improve online visibility for your brand and business, contact us today.
