When Amy Holden stepped up to deliver her session on “Beyond the Survey: Human-Centred, Data-Informed Practice” at Celtic Connections, she faced an audience hungry for solutions to what she cheerfully described as “lots and lots of fires.”
The funding crises, engagement collapses, and counselling cuts that delegates shouted out weren’t abstract policy challenges – they were the daily reality of students’ union work in 2025.
But Exeter Guild’s response wasn’t another technical fix or digital dashboard. Instead, she offered something more fundamental – a framework for building what she calls “data curiosity” across entire organisations. Over four years at Exeter Students’ Guild, they’ve developed an approach that transforms how staff relate to evidence, moving them from data-phobic to what she terms “evidence-based firefighters.”
The metaphor is deliberate. In a sector obsessed with strategic planning and performance indicators, Holden recognises that most SU work isn’t about implementing five-year visions – it’s about responding to crises with whatever intelligence you can gather. The question isn’t whether there will be fires, but how effectively you can assess and tackle them when they inevitably emerge.
Building the team of firefighters
The genius lies in recognising that data literacy isn’t a technical problem – it’s a cultural one. Her taxonomy of three colleague types will resonate with anyone who’s tried to introduce evidence-based approaches in membership organisations.
- Colleague One is comfortable with spreadsheets but needs empowerment to lead on data collection.
- Colleague Two is terrified and embarrassed about their lack of skills.
- Colleague Three simply doesn’t see why data matters to their work.
The traditional response to this challenge is training – bringing in consultants to run Excel workshops or sending staff on analytics courses. But Holden understood that sustainable change requires emotional investment, not just technical competence. Her approach centres on finding people’s “passion projects” and showing how data illuminates the issues they already care about.
When Colleague Three is passionate about supporting disabled students, you don’t start with pivot tables. You start by breaking down survey responses by disability status and asking what the differences reveal about student experience. The technical skills follow naturally when people see how evidence connects to their values and priorities.
This progression from FOMO to advocacy represents a sophisticated understanding of organisational change. As Colleagues One and Two begin discussing how data has helped their work, Colleague Three doesn’t just learn new skills – they develop a new professional identity. They become someone who uses evidence to understand student needs rather than someone who avoids spreadsheets.
The cost of living case study
Holden’s extended exploration of how Exeter Guild approached the cost of living crisis demonstrates data curiosity in practice. Rather than rushing to solutions, her team systematically mapped how financial pressure affected different aspects of student experience – from hidden course costs to democratic participation.
The findings paint a devastating picture of contemporary higher education. When 28% of students think about money “all the time” and 37% identify classism as preventing them from feeling included in university life, we’re not dealing with marginal affordability issues. We’re looking at a system that systematically excludes students from the experiences it promises to provide.
But the most revealing aspect of Holden’s analysis wasn’t the statistics – it was how she connected seemingly disparate problems. The link between cost of living pressures and declining representation isn’t immediately obvious, but her data revealed how financial stress creates time poverty that prevents students from engaging in democratic processes. When students work longer hours to afford basic necessities, they can’t participate in the unpaid representative roles that make student democracy function.
This insight exemplifies what governance scholars call “generative thinking”—the ability to surface connections and assumptions that shape organisational reality. Rather than treating low representation turnout as a discrete communications challenge, Holden’s team recognised it as symptomatic of broader inequalities in how students experience higher education.
The storytelling imperative
Perhaps Holden’s most important insight was her insistence that data must be paired with student stories. The statistics about financial insecurity become viscerally compelling when accompanied by quotes like: “I can’t go to the gym because that costs money. I can’t go to a tennis court because that costs money. I can’t go to a swimming pool because that costs money. I can’t go to a student society because that costs money.”
This isn’t just about making presentations more engaging – it’s about recognising the limitations of quantitative evidence in institutional advocacy. University leaders can dismiss survey percentages as methodologically flawed or unrepresentative. It’s much harder to ignore the lived experiences of students sitting in the same room explaining how financial pressure shapes every aspect of their university experience.
The “hearts and minds” frame Holden applies here reflects a mature understanding of institutional change. Technical arguments about policy efficiency or resource allocation rarely shift entrenched positions. But when decision-makers hear directly from students about the human consequences of current arrangements, the case for change becomes emotionally and politically compelling.
Buried in Holden’s presentation was a genuinely innovative approach to student feedback – the “survey superheroes” panel of 1,000 students who receive payment for participating in monthly surveys throughout the year. This model addresses one of the persistent challenges in student representation – how to gather systematic feedback from constituencies that are constantly changing and increasingly time-poor.
Most student feedback relies on voluntary participation, which systematically excludes the students who most need representation. When surveys are unpaid and time-consuming, responses skew toward those with sufficient financial security and flexible schedules to participate in institutional processes. The students struggling most with cost of living pressures are precisely those least likely to complete feedback forms about cost of living pressures.
By paying participants, Exeter Guild acknowledges that student time has value and that representative feedback requires inclusive participation. The monthly frequency allows for tracking changes over time rather than relying on annual snapshots that may miss crucial developments. And the university’s financial support for the panel demonstrates institutional buy-in to evidence-based decision-making.
Beyond the technical fix
What distinguishes Holden’s approach from typical data literacy initiatives is her recognition that organisations don’t become evidence-based through better analytics tools – they become evidence-based through cultural transformation. The journey from data-phobic to data-curious requires addressing the emotional and professional barriers that prevent staff from engaging with evidence.
The colleague who’s “terrified and embarrassed” about their lack of data skills isn’t suffering from a training deficit – they’re experiencing professional anxiety about competence and relevance. The colleague who “doesn’t think they need to know data” isn’t being obstructive – they’re protecting their sense of professional identity from what they perceive as technocratic encroachment.
Holden’s cycle of curiosity, empowerment, and advocacy creates space for these anxieties while demonstrating how evidence enhances rather than threatens professional practice. When staff see how data illuminates the challenges their students face, they don’t just acquire new skills – they develop new ways of understanding their role and impact.
The limits of firefighting
For all its sophistication, Holden’s framework operates within significant constraints that her presentation didn’t fully acknowledge. The firefighting metaphor, while emotionally resonant, risks normalising reactive approaches that prevent strategic thinking about root causes.
When students’ unions become skilled at evidencing problems – financial insecurity, mental health crises, democratic disengagement – but lack power to address their systemic origins, data curiosity can become a form of sophisticated documentation of decline. The cost of living crisis that Holden’s team mapped so comprehensively isn’t amenable to SU-level solutions, however well-evidenced the analysis.
Moreover, the emphasis on institutional advocacy through “hearts and minds” persuasion assumes that university leaders lack information rather than operating under constraints that make student welfare secondary to financial survival. When institutions face their own existential threats, even compelling evidence about student experience may not shift resource allocation decisions driven by market pressures beyond local control.
The generative potential
Despite these limitations, Holden’s approach represents something genuinely valuable in contemporary higher education: a methodology for collective sense-making that combines analytical rigour with democratic participation. When students’ union staff develop shared capabilities for understanding their organisational reality, they create foundations for more effective advocacy and service delivery.
The progression from individual data anxiety to organisational evidence culture mirrors the broader challenge facing students’ unions in an era of institutional pressure and reduced autonomy. As external demands for accountability intensify, unions need sophisticated ways of demonstrating impact while maintaining their independence and values.
Holden’s framework offers a path toward what we might call “generative evaluation” – evidence gathering that doesn’t just measure performance against predetermined indicators but reveals new understandings of student needs and organisational purpose. When her team discovered connections between financial pressure and democratic participation, they weren’t just collecting data – they were making meaning from their experience in ways that suggest new possibilities for action.
The risk, of course, is that data curiosity becomes another form of managerial control – a more sophisticated way of subjecting students’ unions to audit culture and performance measurement. When universities demand that SUs prove their value through KPIs and impact metrics, evidence-based approaches can become tools of institutional capture rather than student empowerment.
Holden’s emphasis on student storytelling alongside statistical analysis suggests awareness of this risk. By insisting that quantitative evidence must be accompanied by qualitative testimony, she creates space for forms of knowledge that resist easy measurement while remaining politically compelling.
The broader question is whether students’ unions can maintain the critical distance necessary for effective advocacy while developing the analytical capabilities required for institutional survival. Holden’s framework points toward possibilities for evidence-based practice that serves student interests rather than administrative convenience—but realising that potential requires constant vigilance about whose questions drive the analysis and whose stories get centred in the interpretation.
In an era when students’ unions face unprecedented pressures to justify their existence, the capacity to understand and articulate student experience becomes both a professional necessity and a political strategy. Amy Holden’s work at Exeter Guild demonstrates that this capacity can be built systematically across organisations – but only if we’re willing to invest in the cultural transformation that makes technical change meaningful.
