Charities Archives - The Good Insight

What makes people happy at work? Now there is a formula

Dame Carolyn McCall, current CEO of easyJet, and former CEO of the Guardian, where I had the pleasure of working with her, is believed to be the frontrunner for the top position at ITV. Lucky, lucky ITV. McCall, one of only four women in Glassdoor’s Top 50 CEOs rated by UK employees, has not only turned-around easyJet’s profitability, piloting it into FTSE 100, but has also greatly improved employee morale.

McCall, whom rival Michael O’Leary dismissed as “media luvvie”, has re-assured staff that they were not about to turn into “orange Ryanair” and was often seen on-board a flight chatting to passengers and crew. Rated 4.1 out 5 on overall employee satisfaction on Glassdoor, easyJet is now one of the Best Places to Work in the UK, above British Airways (2.9), Eurostar (3.6), Virgin Atlantic (3.1) and certainly no one’s luvvie Ryanair (2.3).

So how much does satisfaction with Senior Leadership influence employee morale (and therefore, productivity, retention and ultimately, bottom line)? An awful lot, and I have data to prove it. Glassdoor collects real-world data by asking employees to rate: senior management, pay & benefits, career progression, culture & values and work-life balance. It also asks people to submit an overall satisfaction score and agree/disagree whether their employer’s business outlook is positive.

I ran regression analysis on Glassdoor’s UK data to determine what influences the overall satisfaction score. The top predictor of employee satisfaction was 1) Senior Leadership, closely followed by 2) Culture & Values and 3) Career Opportunities. Work-life Balance mattered much less, and Pay & Benefits were a minor contributor to the overall level of satisfaction.

And this is the formula, ta-da:

Overall Satisfaction = 0.19 + 0.29 x Senior Leadership + 0.26 x Culture & Values + 0.23 x Career Opportunities + 0.13 x Work-life Balance + 0.11 x Pay & Benefits

As you can see Senior Leadership matters. Yet, it has the lowest satisfaction score out of all factors: 3 out of 5.

Organisations need to create a positive culture and strong set of values that senior managers embody and promote, and that employees share and get behind. According to previous studies, people generally feel happier at work when they can see that their work is benefiting others. People who felt their jobs really benefited society were much more likely to be happy at work: 59%, compared with the average of 38%.

As for pay, even Adam Smith, writing more than 250 years ago in The Theory of Moral Sentiments said that material gains often make us less happy, not more. However, it doesn’t mean that employers can get away with not paying people their worth or luring unpaid interns to enjoy “great company culture and free beer”. Although not the most important driver of employee happiness, pay is still a statistically significant contributor to the overall score.

Worth noting, that employer’s business outlook was insignificant in my regression model, and therefore, did not influence employee happiness at all. So, when companies assume that staff derive pleasure and satisfaction just from working for a profitable business, they are wrong, unless the benefits of being profitable translate into opportunities for employees or shared with the wider society.

Interesting that not a single charity appears in Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work. Charities, which by default are purpose and values driven and generally offer good work-life balance, need to pay more attention to career progression and pay & benefits, which are rated significantly lower vs. the private sector.

As for myself, I’ve never been happier, echoing a well-known fact that self-employed people are most satisfied. In employment, I was the happiest at the Guardian, which offered the best of two worlds: great values & culture together with good pay and career progression. As for Senior Management, here is an anecdote for you. I remember washing my hands in the Guardian’s toilets, when then CEO Carolyn McCall asked me why I sighed and if she could help. I said it was a minor concern, not to worry, it’s just annoying how environmentally-unfriendly were all those paper towels. McCall said to consider them gone. They were gone.

How to achieve behaviour change with ease

I absolutely loved this morning’s Social Innovation Breakfast Club (all my favourite words in one title) at Cancer Research UK. I met incredible people from Cancer Research UK, Kin&Co, TSIP, National Voices, KindLink and Parkinson’s UK – all driven by purpose and desire for social change.

Amazing guest speaker Hannah Behrendt from “The Behavioural Insights Team” think-tank introduced their EAST model for behaviour change. The key principles of EAST are to make it:

Easy

Attractive

Simple

Timely

Make it Easy

Remove hassle and simplify messages. Make the desired outcome a default option (e.g. pension auto-enrolment, automatic organ donor register, healthy meals at school). I always thought that walking rather than driving should be the default option in Google Maps. Defaulting is the easiest (if somewhat paternalistic) option to achieve behaviour change, unless we want people to switch from their current default (e.g. switch energy tariff or not use a smartphone at breakfast – my default behaviour). In which case,

Make it Attractive

Attract attention through impactful design, emotional communications and personalisation. I love speed indication displays on Green Lanes in London, which flash a sad face if a driver exceeds the 20 mph speed limit.

Offer incentives that trigger an emotional response. Financial incentives can backfire, whereas free food (always, always works for me), special perks and charity donations work a treat.

Make it Social

Introduce social norms – let people know that most people already do it (e.g. pay tax, donate to charity, recycle, etc.). Encourage reciprocity and doing something for somebody else. My personal favourite is Unicef’s Kid Power fitness bands and app, which encourage kids in the US to exercise: every 25,000 steps are converted into a food package for malnourished children in the developing world.

Make it Timely

Identify moments when people are most receptive to change, e.g. around major life events or geopolitical changes.

There is also a huge gap between intentions and actually doing something. Help people convert their intentions into a plan with timings – that way they would be more likely to follow through.

I like the EAST framework, it is simpler and more memorable than its predecessor MINDSPACE. And perhaps, they could change “Timely” into “Expedient”, so then EAST becomes EASE.

How can charities ACE it on twitter?

I wanted to understand how different UK charities are perceived on twitter. I chose 10 charities to start with: Amnesty International, Breast Cancer Now, British Heart Foundation, Greenpeace, Mind, Oxfam, Save the Children, Stonewall, Unicef and WWF.

I carried out thematic analysis to extract 40 keywords from over 20,000 tweets either sent by the charities or tweeted about them in the last month. I also put the tweets through IBM Watson’s tone analyser to understand how emotional the tweets were. Based on keyword meanings, associations and emotional tone of the tweets they were from, I then classified the keywords into 9 themes.

Themes and Keywords

For example, “money”, “give”, “fundraise”, “donate” keywords make up the “Give” theme. The more combative “Act” theme includes keywords “stop”, “end”, “change”, “act”, “must”, “rescue”, “combat” and “defend”. And highly emotional “Joy” theme is formed from “love”, “happy”, “good”, “trust” and “amazing”.

Give, Support and Act themes are present in tweets, which tend to be more factual, corporate and less emotional, so I colour-coded them together to form “ASK” grouping. We then move to the pink group of “Hope/Belief” and “Togetherness”, which are about “ENCOURAGEMENT”, and finally the orange “CELEBRATION” group is highly emotional and includes the themes of “Achievement”, “Gratitude”, “Pride” and “Joy”. The size of the bars on the chart above reflects the number of tweets. And as you can see, half of the tweets were the un-emotional “ASK”s.

I then used correspondence analysis to map my 10 charities against the 9 themes and ACE (Ask, Celebration, Encouragement) construct they form.

The more emotional the tweets are, the closer they are to the outer circle of Encourage or Celebrate. Those focused around “Give”, “Support” or “Act” themes are within the inner circle of Ask. The charities are also placed close to a theme that tweets from and about them correspond with most. For example, Amnesty International related tweets are calling to Act but are factual and un-emotional. Stonewall related tweets also call to Act but are Joyful (54% on IBM Watson’s tone analyser). British Heart Foundation related tweets absolutely ace it with Gratitude and high-degree of Joy (70% on IBM Watson’s tone analyser), whilst not forgetting the Give (mostly, fundraising).

Wordle of tweets from or about British Heart Foundation

Emotional tone of tweets from or about British Heart Foundation

Social media is an informal medium, and being emotional and warm is key to connecting with people, and growing a supporter-base. Numerous studies show that emotional communications are much more effective than purely rational for brand building and growth.

Depending on a charity’s objective and where it wants to be positioned, it needs to follow these ACE guidelines:

1. Don’t just Ask, give. Give insight and stories about topics, rather than just highlighting them and quoting statistics; give insight into the inner workings of your charity and personal stories of your team. Respond to people, retweet, strike conversations.
2. Be human, rather than corporate: use human language and don’t be afraid of showing emotions. Celebrate achievements and show pride and gratitude. Or be angry, Oxfam successfully combines Anger (60% on IBM Watson’s tone analyser) and Joy (63%), whilst Sadness (52%) combined with the Encouragement of Hope works for Breast Cancer Now, when they Ask to Support them.
3. Encourage people by providing hope and bring them together through shared beliefs and a sense of community.
Charities do ACE work – thank you!

Data disruption is a positive force for charities

Yesterday I had the pleasure of live-streaming Third Sector’s Big Questions Live debate. The panelists, co-founder of JustGiving Anne-Marie Huby, RNLI’s Leesa Harwood, and the director of international development at Prince’s Trust International Ruth Ruderham, discussed the latest Trends in Fundraising.

Digital disruption, disintermediation, data-driven supporter insight and delighting supporters in the increasingly competitive and noisy space were the main themes of the trends currently affecting charities.

Crowdfunding. Every charity has a good cause but not every good cause is a charity. Digital technology has opened up fundraising to individuals. Just Giving predicts that within 3-4 years crowdfunding will be the main source of income for an average charity.
Charity reviews. Just like they do with hotels and restaurants, people now review and look for reviews on charities. Platforms like Give Well research charity activities, impact and rank charities on cost-effectiveness and future prospects.
Supporter engagement. Trust in charities, like most institutions, is going down (although the overall support is on the up). Supporters feel taken for granted and have low expectations. Charities that treat their supporters as investors are are able to surprise and delight them will stand apart.
Data. That’s why Just Giving invested heavily in data science. Digital data is fast data which presents opportunities to understand supporters quicker and better, and close the loop by feeding back to them on the impact they are having.
Data is also about measuring impact. As progressive organisations leading social change, charities should ask what metrics they should measure; what really matters not just now but in the future.
Disintermediation and authenticity. Just like in the travel industry, digital is removing intermediaries in the charity sector. Donors can now speak directly to beneficiaries, unaided by fundraisers. There is also a filtration aspect, increasingly sophisticated and inundated by marketing messages, supporters filter out information that is not authentic.

Disruption is not always negative, it often presents opportunities for positive change. Charities should go back to basics and ask themselves “why us?”, “what’s so unique about our cause or our way of delivering on the need of the beneficiaries?”. Set metrics that matter and fit for the future, invest in data, measurement and understanding of supporters. Engage with supporters that will make them feel special. And most of all, take your staff on a journey by involving them in various teams, investing in training and development and fostering a culture of innovation. It’s all for a good purpose!