At Cairn we put a big emphasis on involving tenants and other customers in how we make decisions and improve our services.
We received funding from the Scottish Government Next Steps Programme in 2019 which provided us with support from the independent TPAS Scotland to look at how we could improve tenant participation. In 2020 we involved tenants again in a review of our Customer Involvement Strategy which set out our new approach.
We recognise that times are changing and people interact with organisations, like their housing association, differently. We’ve moved to quicker and more informal consultations, which includes making better use of surveys and online technology. Where we are reviewing a service for a specific development or court we are picking up the phone and chatting to tenants directly to collect their ideas and experiences and starting to plan how we might start face-to-face events again.
We have made really good use of our new bi-monthly email bulletins to invite comments on specific services. We have been getting brilliant feedback through the bulletins and tenants have told us they appreciate that the surveys are quick to complete and that they can see a report in the following issue about how we used their ideas. We also offer raffle gift vouchers as a small thank you to everyone for taking part.
During the strategy review tenants told us that we had to improve how we report back to the them the outcome of events or consultations. We now write reports for every consultation and these are all available to view, alongside a simple ‘You Said – We Did’ guide, which sets out some examples of how tenants have influenced decision making.
Finally, we really want to have more tenant representation on our Board so if you are interested then please get in touch for an informal chat about what is involved.