How Tableau and Alteryx data analytics provide the National Trust with 'really powerful' insight into members

'This single point of view data warehouse is going to provide us with a rounded picture of our supporters,' Dean Jones, head of data science at the National Trust tells Computing

"For ever, for everyone" is the National Trust's motto and it neatly encapsulates the charity's work in conserving historic places and spaces throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

From Cornwall to Northumbria, the National Trust is responsible for protecting and preserving more than 247,000 hectares of land, over 350 historic houses, gardens and parks, monuments and nature reserves and 742 miles of coastline.

The National Trust collects and huge amounts of data on all its properties as well as its four million members, and is now attempting to derive more insight from this information with the help of a team of data scientists.

The team was established last year as part of the 120-year-old organisation's System Simplification Programme and is led by Dean Jones, head of data science at the National Trust.

"[The System Simplification Programme] is a three-year programme to transform the information systems of the National Trust to give the people working in the Trust the tools to do their jobs more efficiently and also, crucially, to talk to our supporters in a more personalised and relevant way," he tells Computing.

"The core of this is consolidating all of the information we have about all of our supporters, not just our four million members," Jones says.

"We also have a lot of people who donate to the organisation, a lot of people who leave [money], people who shop in our shops, stay in our holiday cottages. We're consolidating all of that information into a single data warehouse so we can get a view of our supporters in the round.

"This single point of view data warehouse is going to provide us with this rounded picture of our supporters, so that we can use this to derive insight."

One way in which the National Trust is using this data warehouse is in an effort to better understand why some members let their membership lapse.

"We're looking at historical data about people who let their membership lapse versus people who didn't in order to determine how can we then communicate with those people to alter that behaviour," he says.

Jones says the National Trust is crunching data to gain an accurate picture of engagement models for different kinds of supporters. "There's lots of insights we're able to gain and that's really where the data science team comes in," he says.

The National Trust uses the Tableau data visualisation from Tableau Software.

"We wanted something which we knew would allow us to fulfil a number of roles within the team and across the organisation," Jones says. "Tableau allows the data analysts and data scientists to quickly pull together visualisation... It's really, really powerful."

Jones says Tableau is very simple to use, and is accessed by National Trust employees across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

"We have lots of people across different properties and we have regional hubs supporting those properties. So we have offices across the country and they have their own marketing people who want to understand their local audience," says Jones.

"We're using Tableau to provide that insight. It's really a self-service data analytics capability that Tableau is providing, which lets staff really drill into the data themselves," he adds.

"Anybody can log onto our support and intelligence system with their normal credentials. Then, because of the interactive nature of the dashboard Tableau allows us to provide, people can dive in and focus on what's happening at their property or in a particular area," Jones says.

Tableau is "allowing a lot more people across the organisation to make data-driven decisions," says Jones "People who've used it have made real insights which have changed how they communicate with their audience."

Tableau isn't the only analytics tool in the data science team's arsenal. "A lot of people who aren't that familiar with data science think it's about producing these interesting models, but actually a large part of the job is getting data into the right shape, filtering out data that isn't interesting, reshaping it so you can filter it to some other data set that you have," Jone says.

"That's where the Alteryx blending tool comes in, data blending and data filtering in a really nice visual way, with really good integration with our libraries."

Jones currently leads a data science team of nine at the National Trust's Swindon head office and is looking to expand it to 11. However, he says attracting people with the right skills to the Wiltshire town isn't easy.

"[Recruitment] is difficult, especially as we're not based in London. There's a much bigger pot of data scientists in the capital."

Problems luring data scientists down the M4 prompted Jones to look internally for talent.

"We've found a lot of our recruitment has happened internally, because we had a lot of these people who were sitting in different teams," Jones says.

"People who had a lot of experience with producing visualisations, a lot of experience with targeting for marketing campaigns, people who had data analytical skills but elsewhere in the organisation," he adds, going on to explain how Alteryx in particular has helped him to tap into the National Trust's wider IT skills base.

"We have a good cross-section of skills across the team and that's one of the areas where Alteryx has helped us out," he says. "Because some people are more from a SAS background, they're happy with a pointing-and-clicking visual environment while other people in the team are happy with a scripting language like R.

"Alteryx allows both of those kinds of data analysts to use those skills and abilities. There's a very visual environment but also the ability to dive into the details and pull hard scripts," he adds.

Looking to the future, Jones believes his data science team's influence will only grow within the charity.

"Our challenge now is to interact with the whole organisation. Because I think the data science team has a lot to offer across the whole organisation, not only in terms of marketing, where our focus is understanding the supporters and how we communicate with them, but there are all these different parts of the organisation," he says.

"They all want some insight, they all want to know about their customers and supporters and there's a lot we can do for the rest of the organisation," Jones concludes.