case-study_icon_wedding-cake1-150x150Case Study – The Wedding Cake

Situation

A Union with national and regional bodies and a large network of local members. The Union’s purpose is to protect the welfare and rights of its members and to build a collective voice to represent their views and opinions. The membership is the all-important foundation, or bottom-tier, of the wedding cake. They were faced with the following challenges:-

  • To represent their membership effectively, the National Executive needed a more efficient means of capturing their members’ opinions and concerns.
  • To increase its influence and credibility when presenting proposals and recommendations to Government (and/or business leader bodies such as the CBI), they needed to collect “hard evidence” as opposed to the essence of opinion and present this data in a structured and consistent format.

To strengthen the Union as a whole it needed to strengthen the role of its key members who had responsibility for sharing information throughout the ‘layers’ of the organisation.

Solution

When seeking data from multiple regions and high numbers of individuals, the data is more valuable if it can be captured, collated and presented rapidly. DPI provided the following solution:

  • The Solutions were licensed to the Union for a rolling 12 months.
  • DPI consultants carried out “Train the Trainer” workshops to provide key regional executives with the knowledge and skills to run their own in-house workshops at whenever and wherever they needed to.
  • DPI worked closely with the National Executive to establish the key goals and research topics to be explored.
  • The bundled licence provided a highly cost effective and manageable solution.

Regional Execs carried out workshops in every region utilising DPI’s Solutions and the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach.

  • The Pelotoning app enabled participants to brainstorm freely around the chosen topics and to voice any other concerns, opinions or ideas.
  • Pelotoning’s unique, award winning proprietary software created the workshop outputs, in the form of mindmaps from across multiple locations. These were aggregated seamlessly into a single mindmap on each key topic. The ‘screenshot’ function recorded every single mindmap (pre-aggregation) to further strengthen evidence.
  • The Q&A app provided members with the opportunity to ask the executive body any burning question – either openly or anonymously.
  • Multi-choice was deployed regularly through each ‘layer’ of the organisation to guarantee that the consistency and strength of messages from the National Executive to the grassroots and visa-versa were not being diluted or altered.

Outcome

Supported by DPI’s Solutions the velocity at which the Union could now gather ‘hard evidence’ re-energised its consultation and communication processes and made the data itself more valuable. The data gave the Union more credibility and would act as leverage in their future negotiations with government and business leaders. They used the data to develop some of their future strategy at their annual National Policy Conference.

Links were strengthened between the Union’s layers. Members reported a renewed confidence in their accurate representation and a decrease in marginalisation. The National Executive felt re-engaged with its members as well as a genuine understanding of its medium and long-term priorities.