Community Leisure UK is a unique, powerful and pro-active membership association. It specialises in representing organisations commonly called trusts. Charities and social enterprises delivering public leisure and culture services across England, Scotland and Wales.
The Community Leisure UK membership spans 108 trusts, including GLL that manages more than 270 public sport and leisure centres. These trusts are passionate about and committed to meeting local needs and improving the social, physical and mental wellbeing of their communities.
The importance of insight and peer-to-peer learning
Community Leisure UK has a vision that ‘our members are the leading providers of accessible leisure and culture services’. To achieve this they have identified several strategic opportunities, including:
– Embed data and capture of insight to shape business decision making to deliver greater impact and drive efficiencies.
– Maximise peer to peer learning opportunities within the Community Leisure UK network.
Previous research was out of date
The coronavirus pandemic had a massive impact on trusts across the country. Leisure and cultural services closed down. With no revenue coming in, trusts had to put most of their staff on furlough. Those that remained had to cover multiple roles while adapting to remote working.
Trusts were facing a similar challenge to many other sectors. How to keep up with the evolving needs and priorities of both their customers and employees. They were having to adapt to living in lockdown and the new health and safety concerns that came with it.
Community Leisure UK knew that despite limited resources, trusts needed their finger on the pulse. Existing customer data, collected before lockdown, wasn’t going to help with reopening plans.
Community Leisure UK create collective insights
To help trusts discover these emerging insights, Community Leisure UK partnered with MyCustomerLens, the customer listening platform. Together they launched their national member and employee pulse surveys.
What made these surveys unique was how they used open questions to understand the emotions and attitudes of respondents. They used the questions you would ask when having a conversation.
“We’re getting some great insights back from this, and really useful to have the total results next to each section so we can benchmark the data”. Carolyn Thom, Marketing Officer Renfrewshire Leisure.
42 trusts took part in the pulse surveys, including GLL, LED Leisure and High Life Highland. Each trust sent out the same survey at the same time, but using a unique URL to tag their responses. This approach enabled trusts to see their responses within the broader context of the collective data set.
“A key part of the recovery support programme includes gathering insight. This will support trusts across leisure and culture to make effective decisions with regards to reopening plans. By working as a collective through MyCustomerLens, we will get a powerful trust-specific dataset. This will help support members in their service delivery and facility considerations.” said Chief Executive Cate Atwater.
Crucial insights that are informing operational decision-making
In total, the pulse surveys received 17.5k customer responses and 3.8k employee responses. Across the two surveys, our bespoke algorithms instantly made sense of 101k text comments. A task far too big to be attempted by humans! These comments provided a vital insight into the attitudes and emotions of both customers and employees.
The overall insights report was shared with all 108 Community Leisure UK members. In the introduction, Cate Atwater said: “With over 21,000 returns, the information and detail provided for culture and leisure trusts is immense. With the surveys being developed for trusts, this has afforded Community Leisure UK and members the ability to develop actions that are bespoke for trust’s circumstances. This is hugely powerful and will undoubtedly support trusts in making those important decisions with regards to their future operations and delivery of community services.”
Each of the 42 participating trusts is able to see and analyse their responses on the MyCustomerLens platform. The interactive dashboards compare the trust’s results to the collective data set. In addition, the CEO’s received an Executive Summary report for sharing across the organisation.
“very useful to help inform our current and planned approaches with customers and with staff and great to get something that’s specific to KAL. We will be looking to share out to the senior team, Trustees and our colleagues in the Council where relevant.” Alasdair Brown, CEO, KAL