Like most of you I’m writing this blog article from home, working in my home office during the coronavirus lockdown in the UK. I hope everyone reading this post, their families and their colleagues are safe and well and having listened to most of our clients over the past few weeks I’ve been hearing two messages consistently:

• You still need to run your businesses, meet your growth plans, find efficiencies and make sense of what your customers and the market are telling you - and data and analytics are key to this

• But crucially, you’re unlikely to do any new hiring for the foreseeable future, your team are already stretched and time is running out to get your data analytics strategy delivered

Later on in this post I’ll talk about how we’re trying to solve these problems for our clients using our remote consulting services and data, analytics and the insights it can provide, but first I wanted to highlight a volunteer initiative we and our partners at Looker and Segment have been helping get started in the UK: The National Care Force.

Supporting the National Care Force with Looker and Segment

We’ve been volunteering some of our time over the past weeks to help setup the data analytics behind The National Care Force, a volunteer initiative for the UK care home sector organised by Florence, one of our longest-standing clients who run a very successful online marketplace startup connecting nurses, care home staff and care homes and who are now working to organize volunteers who want to donate their time during this unprecedented time of crisis.

National Care Force and has already signed up thousands of volunteers ready to help care homes facing staffing gaps due to the coronavirus crisis, and anyone can join as a volunteer, regardless of work background and whether you’re a care professional (doctor, nurse, physio, carer) or simply a volunteer wanting to help your community.

The challenge for any volunteer initiative like this when time is of the essence but crucial safety and onboarding procedures have to be followed is to make the process as efficient as possible, identify and communicate progress against key performance indicators and then visualise that data in the most effective and actionable way possible.

Our experience working with Florence delivering the analytics on their main online marketplace combined with the data analytics platform and customer data infrastructure services also kindly donated by our partners at Looker and Segment meant that the team at National Care Force had the information they needed at the time they needed it most, and we look forward to supporting Florence CEO Charles Armitage and his team with the National Care Force initiative over the coming months.

Delivering your Analytics Strategy during the time of Coronavirus

Finally and to return to my comments at the start of this blog; we’re hearing from our clients and from companies who’ve contacted us since the coronavirus crisis hit us all back in March that you still need to modernise and improve your analytics capability, centralise your data, improve your analytics workflow and understand what your customers are telling you now more than ever.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been helping our clients organize and analyze their data to better understand:

• Where they can identify opportunities to deliver projects more efficiently using data from Asana, Jira, Harvest and Hubspot

• How they can identify, qualify and make more actionable the website visitor data they collect using Segment, Mixpanel and Qubit

• How they can spend less on Google and Facebooks Ads and make that spend more effective by linking ad campaign data to a revenue attribution model

The Financial Times today reports on a recent survey by London Venture firm LocalGlobe saying that "Many UK Startups have less than a year's cash left" with 50% saying they'd frozen hiring, 30% were reducing staff numbers, 40% were reducing online ad spending and around the same percentage were delaying fundraising by a year or more, and yet they still need to hit their growth targets this year in order benefit from any bounce-back in the economy next year.

We’re setup and have always worked remotely, we can get your project moving, your numbers visible and your analytics strategy delivered now and then help you transition to an in-house team when the time is right; then, just like The National Care Force, you have the insights you need based on data you can trust at the time it can make the most impact to your business.

Contact us now to find out how our agile, fixed-price remote consulting services can help your business operate more efficiently, increase revenue and maintain growth in these uncertain times.