Joshua S. Email & Phone Number

Southampton, England, United Kingdom

I lead on the development and delivery of SUSU’s strategic approach to insight across the organisation to better understand our membership and work to embed a culture of insight at all levels within SUSU.In 2023 I led and designed the successful implementation of Student Experience Surveys, replacing previous methods and expanding a project I launched in 2022 focused on PhD students, to monitor the experience of all students and track across benchmarks across the year. This was a major collaboration, led by SUSU and involved working closely with key external stakeholders in the University. The first year of surveys broke previous engagement levels and response rates.I have overhauled SUSU’s data accessibility to the wider staff team through the use of Power BI to create interactive dashboards. All teams can now explore who is engaging in their activities, what we know about those students, what feedback we are receiving, and what we know about who isn’t engaging so they can use data to evolve how they reach those students.I have also developed personas of our membership to break down the population and combine multiple data streams to better understand their behaviours and needs. This has been presented in a way that non-data technical staff can easily look at which personas they’ve reached, which haven’t, and learn from what we know about them (e.g. interests, communication habits, etc.) as part of their washups. I have presented on this at multiple conferences and am advising several unions on how they can deliver the same for their members.

London, England, United Kingdom

I was responsible for independently managing operations at CUSU sites in London and ensuring CUSU’s Membership Services were delivered across the region. This included providing support to volunteers and members with variety of activities and training, in addition to marketing, event pkanning and engaging students in CUSU related events, campaigns and projects.At CUSU implemented a fully only student representation system for our satellite campuses and was highly successful at engaging student in their democratic processes. In the 2021 Student Election I increased candidate numbers by 156% at our Liverpool Street Campus and achieved a turnout of 29% which was the highest of any satellite campus.

London Borough Of Southwark, England, United Kingdom

My main responsibilities are to manage the representation, democratic and research functions of LSBSU and managing over 500 volunteers. I joined during a period of organisational turmoil and uncertainty and took on many responsibilities from the vacant Senior Leadership Team, supported with marketing and communications and filled in for the Advice Service. My biggest achievement at LSBSU was to rebuild the academic representation system from scratch and increase overall Course Rep participation by 1100%, far surpassing all previous years. This was achieved by overhauling the training syllabus and structure, forging new relationships with key stakeholders and expanding trust across the University. The rebooted programme was met with positive feedback from Course Reps and facilitated an increase of 40% in the number Course Reps trained.I successfully transitioned academic representation online during the COVID-19 pandemic and increased overall engagement to 70% above pre-lockdown levels. Despite the pandemic, I also ran an effective online campaign that increased nominations from students in the Excellence in Education Awards by 46%.I organised and managed the 2020 Student Elections for LSBSU with a minimal staff team in a significantly cheaper, more cost effective way than previous years, maintaining voter turnout at 19% and increased candidate numbers by 20%. This increase was achieved by overhauling the communications and tone of voice in election promotion so that it was more accessible and inclusive to all students. By reaching a wider more diverse pool of students we were able to elect volunteers to more traditionally hard to fill posts, increasing posts filled by 19%. Throughout my time at LSBSU I have demonstrated my resilience and the ability to cope and deliver successful results under pressure.

Southampton, England, United Kingdom

At Solent Students' Union I was responsible for running elections, democratic admin, research, representation and delivering of our student voice programme. As lead for the 2019 Sabbatical Officer Elections I reversed a downward trend in engagement and doubled our overall voter turnout from 7% to 14% and increased our number of candidates by 760% to set a record for the largest number of candidates in a Sabbatical Officer election at Solent Students’ Union. The election success was achieved through innovative new approaches to engaging with students and refreshing our tone of voice so remained inclusive and relevant to all students. I also took a new approach to running the charity’s 2019 AGM by combining it with the election results to create a one week long democratic programme students could engage in. This ultimately led to Solent Students’ Union’s first quorate AGM in many years with a healthy engagement from students. I played an integral role in formulating our NSS strategy for the 2018-19 academic year which achieved an increase of 3% for the Union’s ‘Questions 26’ results. This required a huge amount of research and data analysis, combining our NSS results with our election, representation, society and engagement data to spot trends and determine where best to focus our efforts. From this research our NSS strategy became a targeted campaign that I led on to push the simple message of “Did you know your Students’ Union…” in every classroom promoting the different changes students had made happen at Solent University with the Students’ Union and how they could make further change. I also completing an extensive review of and rebooted the Academic Rep system, participated in a governance review by helping update and rewrite parts of the organisation's Articles of Association and hosted one of the 2018 Southern Union's Conferences.

Southampton, England, United Kingdom

At SUSU I was the first point of contact for students and staff. I worked with other Union staff to support students with enquiries, bookings, ticket sales and engaging in the Union’s offerings (e.g. event, sports, societies, etc.). While in the role I developed my admin and communication skills and gained a deeper understanding of how Students’ Union’s operate.

Responsible for cleaning at a local school.