As a housing association, you know your communication efforts are a vital lifeline for your most vulnerable tenants, those who stand to be hardest hit by the current cost-of-living crisis. But how do you know if your messages are truly making a difference in their lives? After all, without a clear way to measure success, even the outcomes of the most well-intentioned strategies are based on guesswork.
Effective crisis communication is not a “set and forget” activity; rather, it is a dynamic cycle of listening, acting, measuring, and refining. In this final part of our toolkit, we’ll focus on closing that loop, exploring how housing associations can track the impact of their communications and use gathered data to make continuous improvements, thereby always ensuring they have a positive impact on the lives of their tenants.
Why measurement matters
At the most basic level, tracking the performance of your crisis communications allows you to:
- Understand what works: By tracking metrics, you can identify which channels, messages, and strategies resonate most deeply with your tenants. In turn, this insight enables you to focus your resources on the activities that deliver real results for your residents.
- Demonstrate value: Whether it’s increased uptake of support services or improved tenant satisfaction, concrete data provides clear evidence of the positive impact your communications have on the welfare of your residents. This kind of information is crucial in securing internal buy-in and demonstrating social value to stakeholders.
- Drive continuous improvement: During a prolonged crisis, tenant needs and circumstances can change. With a data-informed approach, you can likewise adapt your strategy in near real-time, ensuring your support is always relevant.
- Enhance accountability: Measurement moves your communication strategy from anecdotal to one rooted firmly in data. More than this, it ensures your team is accountable for any outcomes, thereby fostering a culture of performance and continuous learning.
Key metrics to track
The metrics you choose to measure will be unique to your campaign and its overall goals, but broadly speaking, you might wish to track:
Digital engagement metrics, including:
- Email open and click-through rates: Are tenants opening your messages? Are they clicking on the links to your offered support services? Low open rates can suggest a problem with your subject lines, while low click-through rates could indicate your content is not compelling enough to prompt action.
- Website traffic and page views: Are tenants visiting the cost-of-living support hub on your website? How long are they spending on these pages? A high bounce rate might mean this information is not what they were looking for or that it is too hard for them to find.
- Social media engagement: Look beyond “likes.” Are tenants commenting, sharing, or asking questions? When it comes to social media engagement, meaningful interactions such as these often outweigh hard, passive metrics.
Service and resource utilisation, including:
- Uptake of support services: This is a truly powerful metric. With this, you can track the number of applications for hardship funds, energy grants, or referrals to partner organisations following a communication campaign. A direct increase demonstrates a clear return on investment.
- Call centre enquiries: Monitor the volume and nature of calls. Did a campaign about energy efficiency lead to more enquiries about that particular topic? This metric shows if your message is being heard by your residents.
Tenant-centred metrics, including:
- Tenant satisfaction scores: Include questions about communications in your regular Survey of Tenants and Residents (STAR), taking care to ask tenants how informed and supported they feel. A rise in these scores over time indicates your strategy is working.
- Rent arrears data: While influenced by many factors, a proactive communication strategy — one that connects tenants with financial support — should, over time, contribute to a reduction in the number of households falling into arrears.
Gathering meaningful feedback
While quantitative data — gleaned through the above metrics — can offer a broad look at the impact your communications have on your tenants, qualitative feedback offers an insight into the reasons behind a certain trend or phenomenon. To get a complete picture of your tenants — to truly understand their experiences — consider using the following channels to gather input:
Surveys
- Real-time feedback: Incorporate quick surveys or feedback prompts at the point of service — such as online forms, website pop-ups, or digital kiosks — thus enabling tenants to share their views immediately after an interaction. This real-time insight can help you respond swiftly to issues and adapt your communication style as needed.
- Short surveys: Short, simple surveys sent via email or SMS can provide quick feedback on a specific interaction. For example, after a tenant accesses a support service, send a two-question survey. You might ask something like, “How easy was it to find the information you needed?” and “Is there anything we could do to improve?”
- Annual surveys: Use your main annual tenant surveys to ask broader questions about the quality, frequency, and clarity of your communications.
Tenant focus groups
Bringing a small, diverse group of tenants together for a facilitated discussion is a tactic that can provide incredibly rich insights. Focus groups allow you to explore topics in depth, ask follow-up questions, and understand the nuances of their experiences. To get the most from these, ensure that you include representatives from vulnerable groups to hear their specific perspectives on your communications.
Frontline staff feedback
Your housing officers, maintenance staff, and call centre agents are on the front line of your operations and interact daily with your tenants and residents. Tap into this rich source of insight by creating — with resident consent — a formal process for staff to feed this information back to the communications team. This level of detail can be harnessed to highlight how — or even if — your messaging is being received by your tenants.
Digital feedback tools
Deploy simple website pop-ups or feedback forms on your support pages. It’s a small tweak, but a simple button that asks, “Was this page helpful?” with a yes/no option and a comment box can gather valuable, real-time feedback.
The final step: Using data to improve and refine
Collecting data is only the first step in making the kind of impact that will truly be felt by your tenants; the real value — both to them and to you — comes from analysing it and using the insights gained to make better decisions. To put your data to good use, consider:
- Regularly reviewing your data: Set a schedule (e.g., monthly or quarterly) to review your key metrics and feedback. Look for trends, patterns, and anomalies. Is engagement declining on a particular channel? Did a specific campaign lead to an increase in a particular service area of your housing association’s operations?
- Connect the dots: Analyse your quantitative and qualitative data together. If your website data shows that a key support page has a high bounce rate, and your tenant feedback mentions that the language is confusing, you have identified a clear problem to solve.
- Test and learn: Use your insights to form hypotheses and test them. For example: “We believe that using a more empathetic subject line will increase our email open rate among vulnerable tenants.” Run an A/B test where you send two versions of an email to different segments and see which performs better. This approach of continuous, small-scale testing leads to significant long-term improvements.
- Share the insights: Publicise your findings across the organisation. When your wider team understands what works and why, it helps to embed a tenant-centric culture. It also aids in showing that your communication efforts are directly contributing to organisational goals (i.e., reducing arrears or improving tenant satisfaction).
Get the complete toolkit to drive your strategy
Measuring success and using feedback to improve separates a good communication strategy from a great one. But ultimately, it also ensures your efforts remain agile and effective, and that your work as a housing association remains centred on meeting the needs of your tenants.
While this guide provides a framework for building a measurement-led culture, our Crisis Communications Workbook empowers you to put these strategies into practice. By downloading our toolkit, you can access practical resources, including:
- A measurement dashboard template to track your key metrics.
- Sample survey questions to gather effective tenant feedback.
- Checklists for running tenant focus groups.
Equip your team with the tools they need to not only communicate effectively in a time of crisis, but to listen and adapt to the ever-changing needs of residents.
