Two examples of how organisations used data to improve their effectiveness

Example 1 – Using data analysis and segmenting to track and improve user engagement

An environmental charity wanted to understand more about their audience and improve the relevance of their email newsletter to their supporters.

1. They compared their open and click rates to industry averages for email engagement
2. They looked at their last ten email campaigns to spot any stand-out successes or failures
3. They put together a simple A/B test on long monthly vs short fortnightly emails and ran this for 6 weeks
4. They set up a segment of ‘cold supporters’ who had not opened any of their last 5 emails, and ran a simple reactivation and survey journey with this group. People who did not open or respond to emails in the reactivation sequence were removed from the list.

Their learning and testing gave them the following insights:

1. Their list performance was about average for the voluntary sector, with some campaigns dipping below average
2. Short emails with a single call to action, and a clear subject line performed much more strongly than longer newsletters
3. Sending shorter emails more often led to increased engagement
4. Removing 400 unresponsive subscribers from their list reduced their audience size, but since these people weren’t opening their emails, the overall engagement rate went up by 4%.

(Original list size = 2,000 people with open rate of 20% = 400 opens. Removed 200 cold contacts, list size drops to 1,800. New open rate is 22%)

Example 2 – advice charity looking to spot trends in their advice sessions

A local advice charity wanted to look into trends in demand for their services, as sometimes they were swamped with calls, and they had a sense that some people using their service would benefit from additional support. The two questions guiding their approach were:

• How might we make better use of our limited capacity?
• How might we better support people who have used our service on multiple occasions?

1. As a first step to gain a better picture of the number of calls and topics which were coming up, they asked their team members to email a note of the calls they handled, and topics covered. These notes included a bit of contextual information but no personal data.
2. Sifting through the emailed call summaries quickly become time-consuming, so the charity set up a Microsoft Form and included a link to it in their call diary appointments. This made it easier for team members to quickly log their call details. Using a form meant that the data was consistently structured and available in a spreadsheet for easier analysis. This helped the charity start to see spikes in demand for their service, and start to spot which advice topics were coming up again and again. This helped them tweak their staff rota and update their staff knowledge base for in-depth topics.
3. Alongside analysing the data from their calls, the charity started a ‘New Topic of the Week’ Teams Thread, where staff could informally note new or interesting queries they had helped with. This became a valuable reflection tool, and boosted staff morale as they could recognise good advice and offer support where staff felt unsure or pressured in their work.