Not-for-profits often have a mix of volunteers and paid staff, working in a wide range of different roles and settings. That makes it tricky to measure engagement accurately, as it involves analysing survey results by demographic.
With a team of 3,200 – made up of 800 staff and 2,500 volunteers – Stroke Association are based across the UK, from roles in the community to multi-directorate office hubs. That means they can offer support to those affected by stroke throughout the country, but it does mean finding ways to stay agile, by understanding both volunteer and employee engagement.
The charity wasn’t new to employee engagement, but had taken a traditional approach in the past by using internal surveys. They couldn’t view by demographic, and had to manually analyse the responses themselves – which delayed any next steps being taken.
After launching their new strategy in 2019, they needed to make sure their people stayed engaged to deliver it. That required rich, real-time feedback that would enable leaders and managers to make Stroke Association a great place to work, volunteer and grow – with increased motivation and engagement.
We began a listening journey with the Stroke Association. Their focus was to provide an opportunity for staff and volunteers to share how they felt about working or volunteering at the Stroke Association, and collect data and insight on what worked and what needed to improve, including where and how their experiences differed.
In the first year, we ran an Engagement Survey – allowing Stroke to more easily understand both their volunteer and employee populations, thanks to the ability to separate out groups and demographics on our platform. This also gave them both a traditional ‘engagement’ score, and our Organisational Fitness overlay for a deeper understanding of overall resilience.
Not only did the Stroke Association receive an overall engagement score of 84%, it also became clear that there was significant overlap between staff and volunteer experiences – so differentiating their approach didn’t need to be a focus.
Proactively uncovering the nature of their high engagement score meant the Stroke Association could continue nurturing their strengths – ‘Experience’, ‘Customer’, and ‘Motivation’ – and focus on opportunities to drive change, like ‘Innovation’. Having that sense of direction meant they could be effective in pushing towards becoming a more agile and empowered organisation.
Using our Organisational Fitness solution, the Stroke Association also underwent a deep dive into ‘Transparency and Communication’. Using our quickly delivered reports, they could understand their key strengths and opportunities for development – assessing this topic across four subdimensions, for a thorough awareness of what actions to take next.
After this deep dive and their first Qlearsite engagement survey, we offered the Stroke Association team training to run the next survey in-house – which they sent in the spring. Using our platform, they’re able to keep assessing their engagement levels – and gain the deeper insights they need to support their people to deliver their strategy and rebuild more lives after stroke.
