National Trust
Client
National Trust
Company
Preserving the cultural heritage of the UK
Industry
Retail, Conservation, Not for profit
Services
Advise, Design & Build
What we did.
Advised on data strategy, defined team operating model and led design for the single customer view.
About National Trust.
National Trust is Europe’s largest conservation organisation, protecting 709 miles of coastline, 250,000 hectares of outstandingly beautiful land, 104 nature reserves, 6 World Heritage sites and more. This work depends on the active support of 5.8 million members, 20 million visitors, 60,000 volunteers and a team of over 11,000 people.
This team at National Trust wants everyone to be able to enjoy the amazing places they protect, have an unforgettable experience, perhaps a glimpse at the past – and ultimately love these special places as much as they do.
We spoke to Christina Finlay (Director of Data & Insight), Richard Clayton (Head of Data and Data Science) and Sarah Turner (Head of BI and Insight Delivery) about the work Cynozure has done with the National Trust on data strategy, their team structure, the way they work, and building the single customer view.
What we did
Christina outlines the initial requirement in 2017.
1.
The National Trust engaged with Cynozure at a time when a fair amount of frustration across the teams had crept in regarding the performance of the data warehouse, and the effectiveness of the data, insight and analytics work being carried out. It was not clear where the challenges lay and what was needed to correct the problems.
At the same time the data science team was trying to push forward with some innovative new ways of adding value to marketing, digital, memberships and other areas of the business and to do that they needed a big shift in the data science toolkit they had access to but weren’t sure the best route to take.
Given this, they felt they needed help to take a step back and understand if they were on the right track or a total change in direction was required. Clearly changes were needed but as a collective they were struggling to come up with an effective plan.
“There was a lot to do, and knowing where to start can be daunting. Cynozure came in, worked with us to get a plan and (VERY helpful) roadmap in place. Then we started to deliver things in the order recommended.”
Why National Trust chose Cynozure to help build the business case.
2.
Due diligence was carried out across the market and three organisations were invited in to discuss their quotes and approach. Cynozure had been recommended by one of the members of our team who was familiar with similar work that the Cynozure team had done with another organisation.
Christina commented, “We chose to work with Cynozure as there was a great culture fit, and they could work within our timeframe. The specific experience Jason Foster and James Lupton had from M&S was a bonus too. They had genuine first-hand experience of the single customer view, integration with marketing and all the other aspects of Data strategy.”
The initial engagement with Cynozure was to clarify the vision for data, define the strategy, get an agreed roadmap in place, and importantly define specific deliverables that would be achieved within the year. Richard explained, “The goal was to use this strategy to get better insight into the National Trust’s audience and use that insight to help deliver better services, engage with members, increase acquisition and retention.”
This helped get a business case defined and approved by the executive team. Which led to the creation of a collaborative working group between the technology group and the data function. The successful business case meant that the data team secured the budget to work on implementation of the agreed strategy, including developments to the Single Supporter View.
“Cynozure gave us 28 tangible actions – things that we could do and look at individually in terms of effort and cost – and set the roadmap. We referred back to the roadmap document a lot over the course of that year”
Richard shares some of the detail on what was involved.
3.
“The truth is that we were a bit shy of consultants following the bad experience we’d had with consultants that put in the data warehouse. But we were in the weeds, and working with Cynozure helped us to take a step back and look at the big picture.
So once we had that big picture in place, and a clear path to progress and success, we could get on with implementing the recommendations.”
Cynozure was subsequently engaged to provide technical leadership, solution architecture guidance and technical assurance to improve data management capability.
“Rebecca [Noonan, Cynozure Solution Architect Consultant] ran our internal development team and helped them to work in a more agile way, to create with new data sets, new data models and with DataOps principles. She also kept stakeholder management on track ensuring that everyone had the information that they needed when they needed it.
Over the course of 6 months we delivered the first 5 priority business use cases in the Single Customer View. This massively helped improve confidence in the data warehouse and the insight it could provide to our users.”
“Bringing together data on people that bought a raffle ticket, an activity that used to take 15 days, is now automated.”
Along side this Cynozure helped to better define the approach to managing and prioritising demand into the central data function and its overall operating model.
“National Trust now has clear processes in place, along with new ways of working between the data and IT teams. Everyone is better able to deliver on requirements thanks to the agile methodology put in place and they have been able to increase velocity of delivery.
The organisation recognises that data driven marketing and decision making requires continuous engagement and iteration, and now allocates budget to invest in this way. These projects were such a success that National Trust has continued to invest in their data platform, seeing clear incremental value at each step of the journey. They have a structured way to reinvest in data products, and replaced 5 data visualisation tools, streamlining to just one.”
What it’s like working with Cynozure - and some direct business benefits to National Trust.
4.
Richard commented “When Jason and James first came in they did great work in getting all the relevant stakeholders bought in to one method, and getting everyone aligned. Their collaborative approach meant that everyone’s ideas were heard, recognised and accommodated as appropriate in the roadmap. We haven’t had any problems arise in the 3 years since then.
They helped everyone understand what they needed to do. Stakeholders at all levels of the organisation were really bought in to the outputs, had clarity on what to do and the best way to do it.”
The engagement with Rebecca delivered enhancements that delivered real business benefits, including:
- National Trust was able to better understand who their members are, and where they are going; this means they can develop new propositions and services based on their members’ needs.
- Ability to deliver better and more relevant marketing campaigns. Massively increased data quality and no longer have to spend weeks manually checking and cleaning contact data
- A repeatable and templated way of working, piloted through the work done with Rebecca. Ability to deliver faster, in a more agile way, with a focus on business benefit. For example National Trust was able to introduce a booking system because of Covid. Drawing on information held in the data warehouse, the team was able to put together a tailored offering for visitors based on their needs in just a few weeks. A task that would previously have taken 6 months.
“We’re able to get value from data faster.”
The two biggest benefits at the end of 2019.
5.
- Increased efficiency. For example 85 thousand person days have been saved thanks to giving staff access to trusted data
- 91% reduction in the number of calls to the service desk querying the quality of data
Coming next on the data journey for National Trust...
6.
“It’s already underway, but National Trust will increasingly embed a ‘governance first’ approach to data – so as to avoid the need to fix things later. The time has also come to take a look at the technology used for their data warehouse and to start building out a new data warehouse. The remaining work is focused our culture, and specifically, data literacy. Helping the wider organisation better understand what can be done with data and the opportunities that it presents” said Richard.
Christina summarises “We’re keen to enable every one and enable ways of working using data to make evidence based decisions.”
Jason Foster, CEO & Founder of Cynozure, finished by saying...
7.
“The National Trust is such a fantastic British institution that opens up our cultural heritage and helps create amazing memories. A long standing customer that has been able to make great strides in ability to use data to improve the outcomes of the organisation. We’ve supported the team with advice, and hands on help; but we’ve also watched with awe as they have continued to progress their journey through the years.”
