Driving engagement and action from research is one of the most important, yet most difficult steps of the research process. Finding ways to improve that flow of insight around a business can make all the difference in driving return on your investment, so creating strategies to do this are crucial to the impact of insight. We too often default to the standard playbook of using a PowerPoint report delivered through a debrief session, yet, in this new world of hybrid and remote working, there has never been a more important time to craft new approaches to driving activation.
So how can we move beyond the ‘go-to’ traditional tools of PowerPoint and debriefs? Let’s look at three different processes that you can put in place to embed insights.
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| How do insight experts move beyond the ‘go-to’ traditional reporting tools to embed insights into stakeholder organisations? Here are three ways to make this happen. |
It’s often quite hard to get key decision-makers in a room all at the same time. And even when we think we’ve got it all booked in, so often someone gets a diary clash or is called into a ‘more important’ meeting. A debrief can be a great way to get people together to discuss insights and actions, but it’s not always the most effective activation strategy. Why?
Because sometimes people haven’t fully ‘bought-into’ the process yet, or they need time to reflect on possible solutions, or they just need time to build consensus across departments. In this modern, time-poor world where people work from disparate locations, using asynchronous collaboration can be a more effective strategy.
Let me give two different examples:
One great way to create a customer-centric culture is to ensure that your customer’s voice is always being discussed in the business. We can manage that process by creating a continuous cycle research with monthly (or fortnightly) iterations of research and output. Creating an iterative format is a fantastic way of bringing decision-makers into a regular dialogue, curating key insights, collaborating on possible actions and getting ideas of what to research next. In the agile development world, these iterations are called ‘Sprints’ and with most businesses embracing LEAN and Agile language, adapting a research process into an iterative format with monthly ‘sprint reviews’ can be hugely successful.
We’ve been doing that in FlexMR for a while as part of our ongoing Community Panels. Given their regularity and burgeoning audiences, we find they necessitate an online format. They could have both real-time meeting time as well online asynchronous collaboration.
A really neat idea is to curate a ‘newspaper-style’ of feedback, but we move beyond ‘just’ doing it in an email newsletter format. Again, using our ActivateMR boards we build a newspaper style with sections for each theme that has emerged in the last month of research. We use that as a way to brand the research process and engage our audience in the headlines and insights, trailing the need to act.
In the Sprint Review call we run through the board, highlighting key parts and questions and directing people to collaborate on the tiles where we call for action. We also incorporate a ‘what next?’ box alongside each theme, asking for input into what else the teams want to know, which can be fed into the next research sprint. Doing it this way means that it is not imperative that people attend the real-time meeting because the online ‘newspaper’ contains the collaboration as well as the insights.
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| From using newspaper-style reporting to using pre- and post-workshop communications, there are many ways we can reinvigorate interest in insights. |
Sometimes there are decisions and projects that are so big or that are unique and one-off. Sometimes there are company-wide events or ‘Town-Hall’ sessions where you know there are key insights that people must see and be a part of. How do we drive and build that engagement? Here we might employ some push and pull tactics learned from the world of Sales and Marketing.