Data gives us the insight we need to be strategic communicators, to engage people more effectively and in more meaningful ways – and as technology continues to evolve, so too do the possibilities.

Entering its third year, Data Comms Live, hosted by Communicate magazine, has platformed and celebrated the leaps and bounds in activation made possible by new era data software. On Tuesday 20 May, data and comms enthusiasts descended on the Mayfair Hotel to share creative uses of data, measurement challenges, and ultimately discuss how data and technology can improve the human experience.

Bringing home the human cost of data breach to encourage best practice

Our first talk was from Angela Balakrishnan of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) – and it began with a barista calling her name wrong in a café. After ordering her coffee at Starbucks, they called her name out as Andrea, an understandable mistake. But little did Angela know, someone working at the conference she was attending overheard and assumed her name was Andrea, so when she arrived they had no pass for her, meaning she wasn’t allowed in to give her talk. [MW1]

This was a hypothetical of how even small data errors can have unforeseeable consequences. It can be hard to grasp the impact of such a small data error, so the ICO took an approach that focused on the human impact of data breaches or errors.

To do so, they worked with communities, Women’s Aid, National Aid Trust, and National Higgins Trust, to understand how to engage people when dealing with data breaches of the most sensitive kind.

• They developed an outreach programme that was:
• Trauma-informed, to avoid retraumatising victims
• Safety conscious
• Care focussed
• Designed to really listen to victims
• Capable of giving people agency and choice

They found that organisations weren’t recognising the life-threatening nature of data breaches and seeing only the business perspective, describing them as simply “admin errors.” By humanising data breaches, they hoped to show the ripple effect and give examples of these shockwaves that effect people’s lives.

Moving forward, whenever considering data usage, organisations needed to:

• Be transparent
• Stay involved
• Understand what is happening with people’s data
• Consider children’s information – they’re just as vulnerable to data breaches as adults
• Don’t forget training

Key comms takeaway: Organisations need to systemically recognise the human impact of data breaches and have a culture of safety when handling people’s personal information.

How data can be your compass with Stephen Waddington

Stephen Waddington, of professional advisors Wadds Inc. was next on the agenda, discussing consumer research. The specific story he wanted to share was from Brew, a digital marketing agency who was severely struggling during the COVID pandemic. In response, they gathered data on consumer insights, named Pints and Profits, compiled of:

• A survey of 1000+ pub-goers
• Analysis from 750 pub and bar websites from April 2023 to July 2024

This created a rich, strategic data set illustrating the challenges pubs are facing and gleaned the drastic shifts in habits for consumers. They discovered:

• 56% of traffic comes from Google searches.
• 21.5% of traffic come from booking platforms.

In both discoveries, there were improvements to make in the user experience as well as a highly visible means of booking in, to provide people with what they want.

Key comms takeaway: Data can be the compass for your entire outreach strategy. Don’t shy away from carrying out your own research and use this data to inform your approach.

Two lessons learned from Data Malarkey Live

Sam Knowles, podcast host of Data Malarkey Live, spoke with guest Nick Ratcliffe from Volkswagen to discuss how to use data to understand human behaviour while creating quantifiable findings.

1. Data on its own isn’t enough – you need actionable insight. It’s about doing what you can with data, it’s about doing what you need. Think about what you want to learn or do, and prioritise your analysis accordingly.
2. Tackling large data sets can be challenging, but sometimes the reason behind behaviour is startlingly simple. For example, when pushing electric cars on customers, due to the nature of charging the vehicles, they would need a driveway, meaning that a whole subsection was shut out by something small.

Key comms takeaway: Ground your inquiries about engagement habits in direct answerable questions to maintain a strategic edge and not get lost in the hypotheticals. Remember: if you can’t action the insight, it’s not effective.

Justice in action: The role of data and media in advocating change in survivor landscape

Trigger warning for sexual assault in this section.

Data processes

The next session came from Katrin Hohl and Jamie Klingler and was a discussion about their ongoing efforts to get the necessary media cut-through for the Operation Soteria survey.

Over the course of a year, they put a huge amount of effort into designing a questionnaire that would reach victims of sexual assault who had reported it to police. 8000 people accessed it and 4000 people completed it. Safeguards were put in place such as allowing people to complete it at their home in safety and that no data was left on their device afterwards to avoid disclosing to abusers.

The media campaign

The guerilla press campaign was focussed on the actual findings, such as that 75% of women reported worse mental health after reporting. For Katrin and Jamie, the problem then became a matter of communicating the data findings rather than talk about specific stories, which often the media would more fixate on.

From a data comms perspective, Katrin spoke about how you try and use it to empower and improve but inadvertently you might trigger the opposite and change opinions through negativity, i.e. scaring survivors out of reporting. There is also the problem with fatigue around the issue as the data was so consistent and didn’t feature many hard and fast solutions to these problems.

It was a powerful and enlightening session following their incredible work on this issue and an explanation on how much data is present in our lives. Moreover, it was a demonstration of the surprising difficulties in showing your learnings from this data, even when tangible next steps are apparent.

Key comms takeaway: It’s tempting when dealing with data insights to focus on specific stories, but the power of data is its ability help us see the bigger picture.  When communicating to your people, be sure to look at what the data is telling you altogether, rather than using surface level instinct to justify strategy.

Listening to digital whispers with Clermont

Location was the key to what Clermont do and using data has been critical in underpinning that. With so much content in the market already, differentiation was the name of the game.

In reviewing viral restaurants on TikTok, Max and James had found that when customers come to eat, they want a deeper meaning and attachment beyond just hearing the food is good.

What they had to do was uncover the second story behind the data story. In all these markets there was “digital whispers”: the network of conversations going on around communities online, behind the number of likes they receive.

What they decided to rank instead was the amount of resonance this engagement really had:

• Engagement intensity over follower count
• Conversational depth in online forums
• Negative space analysis

From the social media data, they went into deeper analysis to understand what it means for followers to engage in this content. The real gold was in finding the difference between the obvious and the obscure, what James called the paradox of discovery. This was to identify new ways of entering the market when it was so flooded with similar content and similar styles of engagement.

In doing so, Clermont could not only better block out how customers plan their trips but demonstrate their expertise and knowledge of the sector, essentially complicating their insights.

Key comms takeaway: You are the architect of your data insights. Look beyond basic metrics and think about the sentiment of the content and deeper engagement behaviours.

Although these case studies covered so much ground across so many sectors, the main throughline was in the humanisation of your data findings. Communicators can learn from the strategic ability of harnessing complex data sets to create nuanced and thorough personas of who they want to speak to and what they want.