There are two changes that these teams can make to allow them to deliver quicker and better:

1. Remove all the operational burden of running surveys — and create space for deep thinking
2. Generate proprietary and novel insights by moving away from ad-hoc, project-based analysis

This blog post explains how to make these changes and, in doing so, how research and insights teams at comms firms can future-proof themselves.

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The unhappy choice facing research and insights teams at comms firms

When it comes to running surveys, research and insights teams at comms firms (across public affairs, PR, strategy, advertising) broadly have two options. They can either:

1. Go direct to online panel companies; or
2. Go to traditional market research agencies

Neither option gives them what they need. Panels are low quality and painful-to-deal-with, traditional research agencies are slow and expensive.

Moreover, working with panels and traditional research agencies introduces more steps to the process and more gatekeepers. This means more business context is lost at each stage, research objectives get blurred, and projects are more likely to fail to deliver what is needed.

What research and insights teams need is a solution that allows them to turnaround surveys rapidly, at a proportionate cost, and with a provider that makes sure that their data is high quality and will answer their objectives.

Neither panels nor traditional research agencies deliver this:

The reasons why these problems exist deserve a separate blogpost, but a combination of an unwillingness to invest in technology, a dependence on legacy systems, and a squeamishness to confront hard organisational structure questions — such as whether it really makes sense to have a dedicated team of survey scripters who are paid £60k+ each per year.

The harsh truth is that both of these ways of running surveys will make research and insight teams at comms firms obsolete, unable to deliver on the demands of the wider business. Corporate clients are increasingly demanding that the strategic comms advice and recommendations they receive is backed-up by evidence and data, but without compromising on the speed of actually delivering the work — and, in a lot of cases, actually needing their comms agency to move quicker than ever before to keep up with how fast their business needs to move.

Through using online panels or traditional research agencies for their surveys, research and insight teams are inheriting inefficiencies and problems, and are then passing them onto their clients. These teams are left either delivering slowly and expensively to clients, or are sinking huge operational overhead in trying to turn raw panel data into something they can confidently use. This isn’t sustainable.

So how can research and insight teams defend their value and become indispensable?

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Step 1: Make researchers more productive (and happier)

Researchers are at their best (and happiest) when they are working on things that actually provide value to clients: spending time understanding client’s business and challenges, thinking creatively about research design to answer specific objectives, and interpreting survey data to produce answers and insights on your client’s key questions.

What they don’t enjoy is:

• Wrangling with suppliers to get quotes
• Managing fieldwork and monitoring quotas
• Manually cleaning survey data and removing low quality respondents from the sample
• Waiting for final data to begin their analysis

What’s more, clients’ interests and the research team’s interests completely align on all of the above. None of the tasks researchers hate to do provide any real or differentiated value to clients — in fact, clients really don’t want to be paying comms agencies to make sure survey quotas are full. This is not why they hire an agency, so why would researchers waste a moment doing it, if it can be achieved by other means.

Designing research operations and workflows to allow researchers to invest their time in work that provides value for clients is critical. It will make them more indispensable to the client and more sustainable as a team. Doing this, research teams will be able to square the circle of both delivering quicker to clients AND spending more time on value-add work and deep thinking.

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Case study‍

CT Group, a global consultancy that combines research and intelligence to run successful campaigns for their clients, strengthened their research operations in London a couple of years ago.

Previously, they ran their surveys by going direct to online panels. With this approach, they found that a lot of their time (particularly junior team members’ time) was spent on project management tasks, such as survey scripting, fieldwork management, quota monitoring, data cleaning, and data processing. This was making it harder for them to scale the number of projects they were running at any one time, without having to hire and train new researchers.

In response to this, in 2022, CT Group adjusted their process for running surveys. They stopped going to panels directly, and they leveraged Focaldata’s platform and data collection technology to free up more of their time. This allowed all their researchers to spend more time — and develop their expertise — on more specialised work: designing research methods to answer specific client challenges, crafting survey instruments, and analysing the survey data to identify actionable insights for their clients.

All the operational overhead of running surveys was removed overnight, allowing them to scale the number of projects they run, accelerate the development of their researchers, and focus more on data analysis to help clients achieve their aims.

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Step 2: Make survey data more productive

Making researchers more productive and more valuable to clients is one part of future-proofing research and insight teams at comms firms. The second part is getting more out of the survey data collected.

It is not enough anymore just to treat every research project as discrete and ad hoc. Vast amounts of data is wasted and never touched again after the project is wrapped, the report and analysis delivered, and the findings implemented. So many comms firms are sitting on an untapped goldmine of proprietary insights, often without even knowing it.

Leveraging all this survey data is hard, though, and requires serious investment and time. It will require having at least a couple of people on the team with data engineering experience. It starts with building a data lake (essentially, a data lake is a central repository where all your survey data is stored). Storing all survey data in the same place is the first step, then it needs to be structured, cleaned, and validated — by setting up ETL pipelines — so that it can actually start to be used. This is a lot of work to build, but once done it unlocks powerful ways of leveraging survey data to provide more value to clients. At the more basic level, it means that teams can set-up automated analysis, so that researchers can spend more time on uncovering insights, rather than processing and analysing data. At the more advanced level, it means teams can start applying advanced modelling, data science, and analytics techniques.

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Case study

Stonehaven are one of the leading and most innovative firms on this. They are a strategic advisory firm for businesses navigating trade-offs in the transition in sectors such as energy, transport, and climate. Over the past few years, they have built a data infrastructure that allows them to collect, store, and use all the survey data they collect. It enabled them to produce the most accurate 2024 UK general election forecast across any organisation (outperforming all polling companies). They were able to model the election outcome based on 120,000 survey respondents that they had collected over the past three years. Stonehaven use this approach for issue-based modelling, too, allowing their clients to gain far deep understanding of the public than is possible through traditional methods, and then leverage this to run hyper-effective campaigns.

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Conclusion

The number of comms firms offering research, polling, and insight services has exploded over the past few years. Corporate clients expect comms agencies of all stripes to be able collect and analyse survey data, and then use it to evidence their strategic recommendations. Few comms firms are using this data to its full potential, though, and teams that offer research and insights are becoming increasingly undifferentiated.

The way to differentiate is to have a team of smart researchers who have the time to think deeply and creatively about the research objectives at hand, and can deliver genuinely novel and interesting insights. This can only be done with a team that is free of unnecessary operational overhead, and that is able to leverage its data from across all surveys.

At Focaldata, we work with over 100 research and insight teams at comms firms and have helped them future-proof themselves.

By using Focaldata to run their surveys, these teams have freed themselves from the manual, operational tasks that make their lives a pain and hold them back from delivering an exceptional service to their clients. We have also enabled companies — like Stonehaven, FGS, Burson, and Mediahub — to leverage all their survey data.

Out-of-the-box, companies can benefit from Focaldata’s own data infrastructure. Each company that uses the Focaldata platform has their own dashboard, where all their surveys are stored. They can search this library of surveys, easily go back to previous projects to re-analyse for new purposes, or quickly re-field old surveys or questions for longitudinal analysis.

For teams looking to build their own data infrastructure, our data engineers have built their survey data outputs in exactly the format they need it to be ingested by their data pipelines, and then set up direct data integrations so that survey data is streamed automatically into their data infrastructure.

Get in touch to find out how we can help you.