Making every contact count
Together with the National Housing Federation (NHF), Campbell Tickell’s Director, Jon Slade, co-authored the new report: Making every contact count. This explores how organisations can use routine and planned interactions with residents as opportunities to gather information about the condition of their homes and their needs.
The Better Social Housing Review highlighted how important good quality data is to understanding the quality of residents’ homes, the support residents need, and how equitably services are delivered to different groups of residents. The panel recommended that social landlords improve how they use data to assess how equitably services are delivered, to address structural inequalities and the experiences of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people. To help the sector with this, the National Housing Federation started a project called Knowing our Homes.
The first stage of Knowing our Homes was to understand what landlords are already doing to collect data, and how residents feel about their landlord asking for personal information. This involved input from several organisations that are developing an approach called ‘making every contact count’.
‘Making every contact count’, is a full exploration of how social landlords of different types and sizes can use, or further develop, this approach. The report draws on interviews conducted by Campbell Tickell with 11 different social housing providers. Each is presented as a separate case study, together with an explanation of the common themes, challenges and opportunities.
This report is essential reading for a range of people working in social housing, from board members and executive teams to repairs, maintenance and customer service teams.
Jon Slade on writing this report:
I loved working on this, conducting the case study interviews and co-writing the report. An invaluable opportunity to get under the skin better of great examples of good practice.
Perhaps the most noticeable aspect is the extent to which there has been a paradigm shift. No longer do organisations’ passively believe that ‘If something is wrong the resident will tell us.’ Instead organisations are doing lots of different things all aimed at answering ‘How do we know that everyone is okay?’
Read:
Read more about our work with residents and social landlords to improve services.
To discuss any issues raised in this article please email: Jon.Slade@campbelltickell.com
