The National Trust is seeing “powerful results” from using benchmarking tools to help its property managers understand their local audience, with one property seeing a three-fold increase in the number of visitors to an event.

Sarah Flannigan, chief information officer at the National Trust, was speaking about the charity’s £30m digital transformation programme at the Charity Finance Group Annual Conference yesterday, where she said that it had wanted to improve visitor experience and supporter loyalty to “make us more relevant”.  

The charity moved all its data about its different types of supporter, such as members, people who use its online shop and people who rent a holiday cottage, into a central data warehouse. It is also using new tools to help staff understand that data more easily. And it is attempting to collect more data about supporter behaviour.

Since making these changes, the charity has been able target campaigns at them more effectively.

Flannigan told delegates that having this “single supporter view” of its audience was “more powerful than we could have hoped for”.

Flannigan said that the digital transformation project “is not without challenges”, with “quite a lot of new tools” for staff to get to grips with. To help “build confidence” she sends out a weekly update to all staff explaining what is going on.

“We are completely shifting how we think,” she said, and from the results so far “it looks like it is completely worth it”.

Three times as many visitors to one event

She said the new system means properties can compare themselves to one another effectively, and “see at a glance where they need to improve”, she said.

The charity is using Tableau data visualisation software to generate maps and graphs to make it easy for property managers to interpret their data.

Flannigan said that one property, Knightshayes in the South West, managed to triple the number of people who attended is annual music festival after it used data to “home in on three postcodes” in the area with a high number of members, and putting up posters advertising the event.

More than 50 per cent email open rate

The National Trust is also carrying out more targeted email campaigns using Adobe Campaign, to suggest other relevant properties or events to visitors. It bases these recommendations on clusters of properties rather than arbitrary geographical boundaries.

Flanagan said that it had seen some “extraordinary” results from these targeted campaigns, with some emails reaching a 52 per cent open rate and a 20 per cent click through rate.

Looking to introduce a loyalty card

The National Trust is currently in the process of upgrading the tills in its shops.

Dean Jones, head of data science, at the trust said at last week’s Institute of Fundraising Technology Special Interest Group conference, that the charity can now “scan membership cards at till points” to learn more about how visitors behave.

But that “the issue we have there is giving people an incentive” to do so. And said “thinking about introducing a loyalty scheme but there are some implications for gift aid”.