Natalie Cramp, Chief Executive Officer, Profusion
With more than a decade of experience and background in leading private, public, and third-sector organisations through significant periods of innovation and change, Natalie Cramp leads Profusion, a data consultancy. Her mission is to support organisations large and small to get the right insight into the right hands at the right time to create value. She is particularly passionate about Profusion’s Data Academy which aims to improve data understanding across organisations and build and support diverse data teams, to truly enable the transformation to deliver results. She has been recognized multiple times in the top 100 data professionals in the UK, and holds various leadership roles in the data community including Chairing the Women’s Health chapter of Women in Data, leading a cross-industry Data Ethics Advisory Board, and being a member of the Mayor of London’s Advisory Board for data.
Prior to Profusion, Natalie scaled a start-up from £6 million to £30million in just 18 months and ran above the line, digital and email marketing campaigns for the Mayor of London to launch a new brand ‘Team London’ and build and engage a database of 1 million Londoners who would volunteer, securing London the title of European Volunteering Capital. She was also part of the team that delivered the London 2012 Olympic Games and started her career at Deloitte, leading transformation programmes. As a career problem solver, she truly believes data is the key to solving our problems and enabling our businesses to thrive.
As part of our ongoing celebration of International Women’s Day, we sat down with senior leaders from our community to ask them how they found themselves in the world of data, and what advice they have for others.
How and Why did you get into the Data industry?
Initially, Natalie’s career had been spent mobilising big transformation programmes for business or large movements for charitable causes. Underpinning anything at scale had to be digital and data, so it had always been an element of the work she did, and she truly believed that was where the future lay. She was offered the opportunity by someone she knew to join Profusion and has been able to bring the skills she has to drive a data business forward and jumped at it.
What advice would you give to a college or Uni leaver considering a career in Data?
In Natalie’s view, every career is going to involve data moving forwards so it’s not really going to be a choice, and so her encouragement to all those leaving college or university, and indeed everyone in organisations would be to get comfortable with data – they don’t have to learn to code, but they should all know and be confident in the use of data.
For those specifically considering a data specialism, she would encourage them to build their commercial skills as they begin their career in data – the more they understand about how the business operates, the more they will succeed in their data career. It’s rarely about building the best technical solution; it’s about providing the right insight and the right solution to meet the organisation’s goals.
How has being a female leader impacted your journey within the data industry?
Natalie feels her journey in Data has had an incredibly positive impact on being able to attract and retain women to Profusion, which she is over the moon about. Natalie believes diversity is critical when dealing with data, and since she became CEO, Profusion has moved from a 29% female leadership team to 63%. Furthermore, the headcount of overall female % in the business has risen from the 30s to 50%, which is a significant, positive increase.
Natalie has stated that she has found it tougher to navigate the industry itself. She has previously felt excluded and been spoken over but feels because she didn’t grow up in the data industry that seems to make it more challenging, as she doesn’t have the same reference points or connections with the ‘old boys club’ in the industry. She has previously felt like you’re asking to be listened to or included often.
However, times are changing, and she referenced that there are amazing movements like Women in Data which provide a supportive environment that has just transformed her experience of being in the industry. There are also good opportunities that come by being a minority in the data industry, so it’s not all bad!
What do you think could be done better in the Data industry to attract more females to a career in Data?
Immediately, Natalie says there are three things that can be done:
Firstly, be honest about what you really need in a role and what you can teach. Natalie is lucky that the founders of her business took a much broader view of skills than a list of technical languages or direct job titles in data. Natalie herself takes the same approach; the reason she has more females on her leadership team than most of the industry is that she’s gone and found transferable skills from other professions and upskilled in the industry where needed. Also, don’t advertise every role as full-time, women statistically do more of the childcare and it is almost impossible for people to gain a part-time job in trying to move jobs, they might manage this through their existing employer, offer something different from others employers and you will get results.
Secondly, don’t create additional burdens on the only woman in your leadership team to be responsible for all women in the organisation. For example, get external mentors too, and buy memberships in great networks of support within the industry. If she’s running a lot to support women in the organisation and disproportionately more so than the men in terms of internal initiatives, reflect this in the workload or provide support. Women carry enough of the ‘mental load’ as it is.
Finally, stop interrupting and let females speak, especially in an environment where you are discussing getting more women into the industry, Natalie points out that this isn’t deliberate, but it does happen, a lot more in this industry than in others she has worked in. This is a great tool to help awareness in meetings: http://arementalkingtoomuch.com/
Natalie goes on to say her longer-term plans stress there’s nothing more important than supporting schools and talking to them about the exciting careers our industry offers. Gender stereotypes are formed as young as 7, so don’t just talk to the universities or 16-18 year-olds who have already made choices, commit your time to inspire the next generation of women from a young age – provide talks, business challenges, work experience, and more.
Tahanee Twist
Tahanee is an accomplished principal talent partner with us here at Orbition. With years of experience in the industry, she has developed a reputation as a skilled and trusted advisor to both clients and candidates.
In her role as principal talent partner, Tahanee is responsible for managing key client relationships and ensuring the delivery of high-quality talent solutions. She works closely with clients to understand their business needs and culture, and develops customized strategies that meet their specific requirements Read more.
The Profusion Data Academy supports our mission of ensuring that organizations can unlock the value of their data. Our offer is simple. We cover the four key elements that an organization needs to address to improve their data maturity: Use; Leadership; Culture; Skills.
From supporting your recruitment of data talent, to offering secondments, to upskilling your internal teams through our data literacy programs, we are here to support you every step of the way.
We’ll upskill your non-data people to the required level of data literacy and we’ll equip your data people with the commercial acumen they need to translate your needs into data projects through our three-step offer: Data for Leaders; Data Fundamentals; Business Fundamentals for Data Teams.
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