The importance of engagement

As their incumbent brand tracking partner, we were delighted to be invited to take on the running of National Trust's Members Survey.​

The financial lifeblood of the organisation, capturing members views and understanding their needs and expectations was critical – a vital audience who want their voice to be heard, and need to feel involved with the decision making of the Trust.

We transformed the study from a quarterly dip-based approach, to ongoing monthly reads of 1000 members per month, enabling us to account for seasonality and cover a wider range of hot topics across the course of a year, including "magic" and "miserable" moments which allowed members to set the agenda. We carefully stratified the sample by the Trust's Segmentation, region, length of tenure and type of membership (Family, Single, Junior, Life) and matched this wave-on-wave to ensure movements in key scores were genuine.

We delivered monthly reports and SPSS data exports on key scores and the "hot topic of the month", (e.g. Easter Egg Hunts, Christmas initiatives, Comms response, Legacy Giving, Volunteering), supplemented with extra analysis deep dives when required. In addition, we provided quarterly face-to-face debriefs, analysing by membership type, tenure and region, and running key driver analysis to determine the most important drivers of satisfaction and likelihood to renew. 

National Trust now had a more robust, more frequent ongoing read of Member views, which they could triangulate with brand tracking to aid their 10-year strategy of making "Everybody Feel Like A Member", increasing membership to over 4,000,000 across the life of the study.

​At the same time, we received very positive feedback from participants who felt the survey was engaging, inclusive and enabled them to get their point across.