Data Insight Manager

About Northumbria Students’ Union

Northumbria Students’ Union is independent from the University and a registered charity; however, the two organisations work closely together to deliver a first-rate service to students and the University has a legal obligation to ensure the good management and running of the Union. Northumbria Students’ Union is integral to the provision of the modern, top-class service provided to the student membership.  When a student joins Northumbria University, they automatically become a member of the Union.  There are currently over 40,000 members around the world with the majority studying in the city of Newcastle.

The successful candidate will join the Union’s team of experienced and enthusiastic staff who deliver the range of our services to and for students. The organisation is wide and diverse, as are the messages we communicate.  We offer commercial and non-commercial services ranging from bars and entertainment to advice and representation. 

Altogether the Union employs over 130 staff at the busiest time of the year and employs a core of around 50 people on a year-round basis.

The Marketing department sits as one of our core teams within the Union, alongside Education, Student Experience and Operations. Each is led by a Head of, who reports to the Deputy Chief Executive Officer.

Data and insights are key to our effective understanding of students and life on campus and the marketing department help achieve this through thorough and robust research throughout the academic year.

About the Role

We’re looking for someone who can bring research to life to help Northumbria Students’ Union do what it does best – have a positive impact on the lives of students. You will support our activity by providing a high-quality evidence base and recommendations, to enable others to act on the issues that matter most to our students.

You will support teams through providing monthly data dashboards from existing results, highlight research findings, support other teams in their research as well as lead on research projects. You will champion robust evaluation in the organisation and ensure that learning is applied. Through your work, the Union’s leadership team and student representatives will have the tools and resources to more effectively lobby for changes based on student needs and understand the impact and progress of their work.

You will understand the importance of gathering and using high quality data to understand the needs of our members, the student body. You will have experience of developing insights based on large data sets. Crucially you will be motivated by the opportunity to help your colleagues understand the data, able to translate this data into metrics, and visual displays and reports that service leads and staff around the organisation can understand and utilise in planning their services. You will therefore have great customer service skills and presentation able to work with staff across the Union.

Main duties & Responsibilities:

Understanding our members and their needs

1.   To support our work to gather data and information on student views and experiences in a coordinated, ethical and legal approach and support the use of this data in our activities.

2.   To ensure a process of weekly collation and presentation of departmental data weekly and monthly, to a dashboard of results against targets.

3.   To oversee the analysis of key data sets such as our annual student survey and Go Out and Listen Days, focus groups etc. in line with organisational and Sabbatical priorities and in a timely manner to feedback to students.

4.   In partnership with the Heads of Department ensure Officers and staff across the organisation are briefed on relevant research findings and supported to incorporate these into their work and able to access research easily on Sharepoint.

5.   Work with Senior Management to provide a coherent data set in annual reports internally, to the Board and external bodies to inform decision-making and strategic direction.

6.   To provide support for student consultation activities undertaken by key volunteers.

7.   To support and advise other teams with secondary research activities they wish to undertake.

8.   To support staff in equipping representatives and officers with data and evidence that enables them to fulfil their duties.

9.   Carrying out research with Northumbria University and other Students’ Unions.

Understanding our organisation and its performance

10.Understand and use the Unions CRM system ‘SUMS’ to create specific data and insights reports throughout the year.

11.Write briefings for staff to ensure proper entry of data into SUMS and highlight areas of poor performance.

12.Support commercial operations by generating regular dashboards monitoring financial, engagement and satisfaction metrics in an accessible way[NS1] 

13.To provide Northumbria Students’ Union’s leadership team with a range of annual and in-year evaluation tools to inform decision-making and strategic direction. [NS2] 

14.To ensure strategic KPIs are measured robustly and reported through SUMS or other reporting systems.

15.To support Northumbria Students’ Union’s leadership to identify appropriate performance measures in strategic and annual planning processes.

16.To support teams across the organisation to evaluate their projects and progress against annual plans.

17.To support a culture of learning and continuous improvement within the organisation around collection of, interpretation and application of data

Other Duties

18.To ensure department delivers the highest standards of service as expressed through the Union’s customer service standards.

19.To attend appropriate and relevant training events, courses and conferences as required.

20.To respect the democratic structure of the Students’ Union; the post holder will be expected to work with elected officers and help support achievement of their manifestos.

21.To abide by the Students’ Union governance, policies and procedures at all times.

22.To uphold the Students’ Unions environmental and wider corporate social responsibility practices.

23.To undertake mentoring of staff and students as agreed with your line manager and to undertake if required investigation into breaches of the Code of Conduct for student members and/or sit on disciplinary panels.

24.To be committed to NSU’s values of Supportive, Inclusive, Fun, Democratic, Ethical, Innovation and Excellence

25.The above is not an exhaustive list of duties and the post holder will be expected to undertake any other reasonable duties as may be required.