Ever Wondered What your Members are Really Thinking? Quantifying the CIPD Brand

Sarah Corney, Head of Customer Experience

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

Ever wondered what your members are really thinking, if your messages are really resonating? If your members’ hearts and minds truly align to your organisation’s purpose?

We certainly did. At CIPD we’ve developed an index that measures how our brand is perceived by our members, and whether our member engagement and brand strategies are working. For membership bodies, developing member loyalty and a feeling of connection to your brand is critical. Your brand is one of your key assets that you need to enhance, protect, and evolve.

The index is made up of two parts, a set of brand perception KPIs, calculated via a quarterly membership survey, and a set of reach and engagement KPIs that determine the efficacy of the brand across web and social media. 

We start the member survey by asking whether and to what extent our members feel we’re fulfilling our stated purpose. We then ask to what extent they feel the CIPD is championing the profession. And to what extent is the CIPD an important partner to them in their career.

The survey also measures how members rate us across a range of 11 different brand attributes. These represent both ‘bread and butter’ attributes (e.g. ‘trusted’, ‘respected’), and more aspirational ones, as we shift our content strategy into more challenging spaces (e.g. ‘activist’, ‘change catalyst’). 

Brand is more than what you say about yourself, it’s also the totality of members’ experience with you. And to that end we also ask a number of customer attitude questions: a ‘likely to recommend’ question followed by a ‘how likely are you to discourage’ question, from which we calculate a Word of Mouth Index (WoMI) score (a more nuanced and useful score than NPS). We also ask a customer satisfaction and a customer effort question, and both include the opportunity to comment. We analyse the comments for themes that help identify and prioritise Customer Experience activities.

We’re also able to run some further analysis. By cutting the data by customer segment, as well as by membership grade, we can identify trends across particular groups; and with regression analysis we’re finding relationships between different factors (e.g. brand attributes and customer satisfaction scores). Fascinating stuff!

We also measure how engaged members are with our ‘shop windows’, our websites and social media channels, and report these out in the reach and engagement part of the index. But the question is, in the world of Big Data, what measures drive real insight? How did we determine the signal from the noise? 

We decided to measure and report on four web metrics:

• domain authority, which predicts how well a website will rank on search engine results pages
• brand popularity, the total number of Google searches for terms that contain our brand name
• share of voice, how well the topics we cover on our website rank on search engine results
• website visitor engagement, the number of sessions multiplied by session duration. 

Added to that we gather two social scores:

• social reach, which totals the number of messages seen by our Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook followers and their networks
• social engagement, a total of the engagement activities (tweets, replies, opened links, etc.) across all of our social channels. 

So how do we share this dizzying array of data? We express each of the scores out of 100, which makes it easier to digest and to track changes. And we share the quarterly report (the headlines, the data and the analysis) with everyone internally – we blog about it on the intranet, we run lunch and learns, and we present the findings at team meetings. 

We want to develop a shared sense of ownership for these numbers across the Institute. Everyone needs to understand how their work contributes to these numbers and how they can influence how our brand is perceived and experienced by our members. 

(A big shout out to Sam Whittaker @itsSamActually, Roy Ajifoh @9jaboy1 and Marcos Nobre @marcosnobre for their inspiration and help in compiling the Brand Index.)

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development is the professional association for human resource and learning and development professionals.