Member Associations

The Client
The ICE Group consists of The Institution of Civil Engineers, Thomas Telford and One Great George Street. The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) is a membership organisation that exists to promote and progress civil engineering around the world. Thomas Telford is the knowledge business of the Institution of Civil Engineers, creating specialist products and services for the civil engineering and construction markets. One Great George Street is an award-winning central London conference venue, situated in close proximity to many of the capital's major sights.

The Pain
The ICE Group has 77,350 members of which 55,557 are working engineers. The Group is broken into a number of business units in different regions, many of whom were communicating with the member base. As different departments were unaware of other communications being sent by colleagues, ICE received complaints from members about the numbers of communications they were receiving.

The Solution
The ICE worked with Concep to identify around 80 individuals across the group who were involved with communicating messages with stakeholders and members. Working with the database manager and corporate communications team, Concep produced a communications audit questionnaire and consulted over 50 individuals within the ICE Group.

Considering the size of the Group and the growth in the number of communicators, there were a number of areas that had not been monitored that Concep was able to. Acting as an independent auditor, Concep helped avoid any potential bureaucracy and was in a position to gather genuine feedback confidentially, that the central office may not have been exposed to.

Some key discoveries include:

• 97% of the ICE Group use email to communicate with members
• 21% were not using the central databases effectively, for example using data from the wrong source or database
• 75% were not updating the central databases correctly

The full results and findings were then presented to the ICE Group board of directors with a number of follow up initiatives suggested.

The Results
Once the follow up initiatives were agreed, Concep and the ICE communications team presented the results to the ICE Group.

A top line of the initiatives introduced:

• Retraining on internal databases and data protection policy
• Regions Day - A specific day for each regional communication
• Shared communications - Different departments piggy backing other newsletters from the group to similar audiences with relevant content.

Since the implementation and completion of the audit, readership has improved. Most importantly, a cultural change has been made where teams in different regions and departments are seeing themselves as part of the Group and benefiting from a holistic communications strategy.