Learn about the CBI insights strategy and how the power of insight can transform your association.
Data and insight is the most important asset for a trade association; whether that’s from meeting notes, council readouts, or reactive anecdotes to the current crises – whatever the size of your organisation or membership it’s important to make the best use out of the insight available to you.
This month we held a roundtable discussing best practice in this field and shared our own progress and strategy.
The CBI has always been strong in feeding insight from members into government, the side that needed a refresh was how we used this insight internally. Through the coronavirus pandemic, the CBI kept engaging with members and government on a daily basis, so we had to change the way we captured the insight, to be able to quickly synthesise the vast amount of data we were collecting.
The CBI Insight Strategy
At the CBI, we’ve developed an insights function in the form of a topic specific ‘coronavirus’ inbox, which has now evolved into a more general ‘insights’ inbox.
The data being collected was highly unstructured, mostly collected from member’s meeting notes, phone calls or emails – so our CBI experts started thinking about the best way to manage high volumes of data, at speed.
The first part of the process was to establish the data we actually needed. We could then begin building the infrastructure to capture the relevant insight.
We were also able to build a bespoke insights tool which allowed us to address the key challenges of trying to keep the insights process very simple to encourage adoption and stay within a reasonable budget. We didn’t include a specific template to make sure our member insight was simple and easy to access – so that we could later on put it into different categories to support members facing similar challenges. Phase 2 will be the integration of an AI function to further str
Exclusive My CBI member-only content 
