The start of a new year is a time for many to go in search of fresh ways of doing things, whether it’s changing your diet or exercise routines to enhance your personal health or committing to stick to a budget to improve your financial well-being. The same goes for work. Looking to up your game or add some new wrinkles to how you present research findings and insights to your internal stakeholders? Drawing from the verbatims gathered during the fielding of our corporate researcher survey, which formed the basis of much of our annual Corporate Research Report, here is a look at some of ways respondents said they disseminate research data to their colleagues.
True, some of the approaches they cited are anything but fresh: PowerPoint decks, individual meetings, group gatherings, Webinars and seminars were all cited multiple times. (Hopefully their broad use is a testament to their effectiveness rather than corporate inertia!) But perhaps something below will spark an idea for a new approach, or a combination of approaches, that can help you enhance what you are already doing or take a whole new tack.
“We have monthly breakfast meetings for the entire organization. Each month a few folks are selected to either talk about or present on a topic. Current market research is often one of the topics. These sessions are also recorded so that if you can’t make it in person you will still be able to listen/view it.”
“The best presentations are with the whole team (small to medium group) involved as they bring multiple perspectives to the results. Lots of good team dialog and thinking using this approach. We are trying to move towards putting all research on a company intranet including short videos of results.”
“Increasingly we are trying a more workshop approach than a presentation. Also trying to plan when decision makers are at our local Starbucks and discuss with them or chat with those who influence them. Perhaps that’s an ad hoc meeting but it feels more conversation, less meeting. We also sometimes have a speaker from an external company provide a case study that is parallel or a way to shake up thinking.”
“More use of videos or anything visual – the medium may or may not be the message but it sure MAKES (or breaks) the message.”
“Crisp two-minute summaries … like a power page.”
“We have customers present and talk about their experiences.”
“We use Tableau. The senior team has access to online dashboards and at this time reports are mostly delivered electronically to a wider audience. We have an online portal where some information is shared with stores.”
“We will be creating virtual customer rooms for major customer types.”
“We emphasize introducing groups to important research programs and results face-to-face and incorporating those colleagues in the problem-solution or improvement process. We invest a lot in our research/insights team members establishing relationships with ‘client’ groups and actively collaborating with them.”
“I attempt to get other groups to see the utility of information and insight to the point where they want to share it within their organization (with or without me).”
“SharePoint sites, in-house conferences and fairs, training sessions, internal courses.”
“We have started creating short summaries for our ethnography studies – they want the results fast rather than in depth. We have also developed a dashboard for all of the quantitative metrics that we track for the organization (generally top-two box measures of sat, ease, recommend and advocacy, etc.).”