Trade association update: June 2022

Data and insight is the most important asset for a trade association; whether that’s from meeting notes, council readouts, or reactive anecdotes to the current crises – whatever the size of your organisation or membership it’s important to make the best use out of the insight available to you.

This month we held a roundtable discussing best practice in this field and shared our own progress and strategy.

The CBI has always been strong in feeding insight from members into government, the side that needed a refresh was how we used this insight internally. Through the coronavirus pandemic, the CBI kept engaging with members and government on a daily basis, so we had to change the way we captured the insight, to be able to quickly synthesise the vast amount of data we were collecting.

The CBI Insight Strategy

At the CBI, we’ve developed an insights function in the form of a topic specific ‘coronavirus’ inbox, which has now evolved into a more general ‘insights’ inbox.

The data being collected was highly unstructured, mostly collected from member’s meeting notes, phone calls or emails – so our CBI experts started thinking about the best way to manage high volumes of data, at speed.

The first part of the process was to establish the data we actually needed. We could then begin building the infrastructure to capture the relevant insight.

We were also able to build a bespoke insights tool which allowed us to address the key challenges of trying to keep the insights process very simple to encourage adoption and stay within a reasonable budget. We didn’t include a specific template to make sure our member insight was simple and easy to access – so that we could later on put it into different categories to support members facing similar challenges. Phase 2 will be the integration of an AI function to further streamline the process.

Q&A

Is it difficult to get responses from our members?

The age-old question for all associations! We find that using very targetted questioning on things that are affecting our members in the present gets a better response rate.

Our teams are on top of current issues and recommend questions we should/need to be asking our members – this team then works closely with account managers to help feed the questions into member conversations.

We have found that surveys in general get poorer response rates. To mitigate these we opt for carefully thought out questions, instead of generalist surveys.

What kind of investment is needed for insight technology?

The investment needed can vary depending on your data needs. Some data visualisation processing tools can cost up to £1million, and the biggest cost is usually GDPR compliance processes.

One way we’ve found to mitigate some of these large costs is to go directly to the vendor and build our own bespoke tool for our specific insights needs, we can then implement smaller tools around this to help manage the process.

How do we manage the outputs of the insight?

The main output from the insight we get creates the products we use to communicate with government, from heatmaps to bulletins and sector dashboards.

We then work closely with our internal propositions team to help turn this insight into helpful and highly specific member content.

If you would like to find out more about the CBI’s insight strategy please reach out to Kaye Townsend.