Planning popular workshops including 'Insight and Information' at the National Engagement Conference 17
Thursday 3rd of August 2017
Tpas training manager, Val Alker, shares her experience of planning popular workshops and and running the 'Insight and Engagement' workshop at Tpas National Tenant Engagement conference 2017
Each year the Tpas Training team design some of the many workshops for our National Tenant Engagement Conference.This year we chose to deliver tasters of some of our popular courses that link to key issues in tenant engagement today.
Going Digital - exploring digital engagement across gathering information from tenants, ise by scrutiny group and in communities. A taster of our Digital Engagement course available nationally in various locations and in house.
Skills for Scrutiny - highlighting the approaches that make scrutiny effective and produce outcomes for organisations. A taster of our new 'Scrutiny - Staying Effective in a Changing World' course available nationally and in house.
Getting the Knowledge - to bring new volunteers or those who have changed roles up to speed on what makes effective tenant and community engagement and the valuable role they can play. A taster of our 'The Knowledge' course for involved tenants and residents that has been run nationally and organisations are working with us to adapt for their own involved volunteers.
Linking Customer Insight with Effective Engagement - a subject that I feel passionate about at the moment as I am convinced that effective engagment today relies on organisations linking their valueable insight with their tenant engagement.
This session was a taser of our 'Techniques to gain insight and information' course that we ran around the country earlier this year and is now being tailored for organisations in house. It received fantastic feedback from the South Coast Tenants Conference and is being delivered next for a group of Yorkshire housing providers including Broadacres, Joseph Rowntree HT, Together Group, Yorkshire Coast and Thirteen Group.
The insight workshop at the Conference proved very popular. Around a quarter of attendees came along on one of the two sessions. My recipe for the successful workshop was to find out what the participants were already doing to link insight or information; give them a glimpse of the power of data in influencing and decision making and make them aware of the range of methods organisations were successfully using.
I made sure all tables all had a mix of people from different organisations. Many also had a mix of staff and volunteers too. The range of understanding and use of customer insight ranged from the completely integrated to the 'I have never heard of it'. The split here certainly wasn’t between volunteers and staff but between organisations. Some resident volunteers could give a dictionary definition and numerous examples, other staff said ‘I’ve never heard the term customer insight before’ and had discovered something completely new!
So we know from the conference that for many customer insight and tenant engagement are fully linked and services and approaches are already benefitting. For others there are bridges to cross and links to make within their organisations. What’s the betting that the gap will close in the next year? If you haven’t heard the term customer insight now – go find where it is in your organisation.
Customer insight - what proved popular?
Participants were keen to be able to use data geographically to expose trends and aid planning at a neighbourhood level. Also to analyse by household or house type characteristics.
Journey maps are working well for many organisations particularly to link qualitative and quantitative data.
Moving more towards using evidence based decision making and recommendations and monitoring outcomes across all tenant engagement not just scrutiny.
What people said about the conference sessions
‘the content was new to me but it was very interesting and informative’
‘learning how to use insight is going to be invaluable’
‘it clarified what customer insight is and how it works with tenant involvement’
‘insight is not just about profiling’, ‘ I am beginning to understand what it really means’
If your organisation would benefit from any of these sessions contact Tpas Training on 0161 868 3520 or for nationa courses check out the events calendar.