It’s all about the data
Why good data makes great strategy
It’s all about the data
Why good data makes great strategy
Mike Joslin knows a thing or two about how organisations can best engage with large numbers of diverse people. A data expert who has been a driving figure in some of the biggest and most successful campaigns in recent British political history, he is now senior digital and marketing officer for campaigns at the National Education Union (NEU). In this role, he has helped it become the only education union to meet the ballot threshold for strike action during recent disputes over teachers’ pay.
Joslin sees the connection between strategy and good data as fundamental for any organisation that wants to improve engagement to achieve its goals. “The most important thing is you have to understand what your strategic objectives are and then you can have a strategy,” he says. “And you can only do that if you have data flow.”
Moneyball activism
For the NEU, the strategic objective was to get more than half of its over 500,000 members to vote for strike action. To do this, Joslin and his colleagues engaged in what they termed “Moneyball activism” – named after the Brad Pitt film about how data analysts turned a struggling US baseball club into title contenders.
But instead of using analytics to find undervalued relief pitchers on rival teams, Joslin employed the same principles to directly target 80,000 people who he thought could be convinced to vote for strike action, given the right messaging.
He focused on members whose low pay meant they were priced out of their local housing market and used data from Rightmove to target very specific ads at them, highlighting how much frozen pay had cost them and comparing that figure to property prices in their area. In the end, Joslin estimates that the crossover of those directly targeted and those voting in favour of strike action was “90 to 95 per cent”.
He focused on members whose low pay meant they were priced out of their local housing market.
Deep understanding
That only happens, he says, because intelligent collection and use of data allowed the union to understand what its members actually wanted: “We deeply understand our membership. We understand who is likely to vote and who isn’t and so we can focus resources in the right places.”
And while there are some obvious differences between engagement with a body of union members and with housing association tenants, Joslin believes there are also important lessons to be learnt from his experience.
He describes the type of engagement that produces results – irrespective of the type or size of the organisation – as “relationship-based engagement”: that is to say engagement built on understanding who the people you are trying to reach really are, what issues they are interested in, and who they want to hear from about those issues.
“If housing associations invested a bit more time in understanding their tenants, then people would be more satisfied, and you can reduce the burden on customer services so there’s a cost benefit too,” he explains.
“You need to understand as much about your customer as possible in order to make any decisions. Every single thing I do is rooted in logic, data and strategy. But before deciding the strategy you need to have an evidence base for it. You simply need to create a data system that allows you to analyse your customers, then you work out how to provide better customer services and have a more streamlined technology approach.”
Mike Joslin
Senior Digital and Marketing Officer for Campaigns, National Education Union
“Every single thing I do is rooted in logic, data and strategy. But before deciding the strategy you need to have an evidence base for it. You simply need to create a data system that allows you to analyse your customers, then you work out how to provide better customer services and have a more streamlined technology approach.”
Bad technology
However, a spanner in the works for the housing sector, according to Joslin, is that “the technology at a lot of these associations is awful”, meaning that there is often little connection between the different services customers use, creating frustration and anger. “It frustrates me when organisations don’t recognise your previous touch points with them,” he continues. “It’s one of the most anger inducing things in customer management; if you can personalise communications, it creates that relationship-based engagement.”
And so how can the sector start to improve the way it talks to its customers?
“For housing associations it’s about everything being joined up – every touch point needs to link to each other, and housing associations are dreadfully poor at this. There are lots of different computer systems doing lots of different things, and people who are talking to people are not talking to each other. You need to make sure everyone is on the same system; you need a central source of truth so you can understand and create a customer journey.”
Joslin also believes that large language models (LLMs) and machine learning could be used to automate huge swathes of the work done by customer services and could quickly and efficiently identify ongoing issues for customers.
But irrespective of the desired outcome or the way you get there, three things are essential to effect change: hire the right people; have an effective strategy; and put money behind it. And over and above all of this, insists Joslin, comes leadership.
“You can overcome anything through good leadership [and] proper holistic organisation-wide decision making,” he says. “A lot of people think they do that, but they don’t.”
SHARE THIS PAGE
