Insight nuggets

So the first thing that I thought I’d answer is, what is insight? What is it? As part of doing that, I thought I’d just double check the dictionary definition of insight. And it’s actually like a flash of inspiration based on intuition, which is kind of not what we mean. Well, totally not what we mean when we talk about insight in a sort of work sense, a professional sense.

Really, we mean that usually the flash of inspiration might be there, but it’s not based on intuition. It’s based on data, knowledge, something we found out. And that data definition might be quite broad, might include things that people have done with us, might include survey questions or interviews or lots and lots of records from conversations on Reddit. But it’s usually got a bit of data and robustness, by which I mean, like you thought through what you’re trying to answer, how you’re to do it and what kind of data is going to be most useful. So that is what I would consider insight.

There’s a lot of ducks over there. I love ducks.

So one of the things that I think people find a bit puzzling about insight is that there are different types of insight, some of which have slightly similar names, and that’s not that helpful. So sometimes people talk about qualitative and quantitative insight, and even people who work in insight quite often get those terms muddled up. So don’t feel silly if you ever do.

And sometimes they’re quite hard to say, but, the main point of this video is what are they, so insight can come in lots of different forms.But broadly there’s usually behavioural insight. So understanding stuff that people have done quite often that involves analysis. So looking at database records where you’ve captured behaviour, doing lots of stats and numbers and finding out, you know, how many people did this thing and this thing, for instance. Quantitative insight is, broadly speaking, surveys. So it’s asking lots and lots of people questions, enough people that you can quantify it. So you can say like 80% of people think this.

And qualitative data is the kind of data that you get from conversations with people usually. So it might be interviews, it might be focus groups, but it’s the sort of stuff you can’t really put numbers on. Having said that, there’s quite a bit of crossover because sometimes you basically get qualitative data from surveys. And if you have an open ended ended questions and you can sometimes quantify things that you’re getting interviews and focus groups just to, just to keep it interesting.

But broadly, quantitative research is where you can count it. Qualitative research is more open ended. And if you’ve got a person there doing it, you can often really dig into things. So it’s quite different to a survey. And then data analytics is usually how many people did things on your database. As I said, there’s lots of other cool types of insight which I will talk about at some point.

One of the things that comes up sometimes is, what’s the best form of insight? Is it better to have data about things that people have done, behavioural data. Is it better to do interviews or focus groups? Is it better to have numbers? To go out to a really big volume of people? There isn’t a straightforward answer to this one, because it depends.

It depends what you want to know. Each type of insight has its strengths and weaknesses. Qualitative insight is really, really good if you want to dig into a lot of depth. But it’s hard to do that with a lot of people. So you can’t always extrapolate that out to make confident predictions of how huge numbers of people are going to behave. With survey data, you often get a bit of bias because we get particular types of people who want to take part. And people tend to want to seem nice, which is one of the problems that they always have with polling data.No one wants to admit that they’re going to vote for people who aren’t nice.

Each form of insight has its pros and cons, and it depends very much on what question you’re trying to answer as to which is the best. And often it’s really helpful to do more than one. You get a really good feel for it if you can use different methods.

And that’s what I really love doing if I can. Obviously there’s a bit more work, sometimes a bit more budget involved in doing that, so it’s not as possible, but it’s pretty cool when you can.

Okay. This is one that I feel like I get asked sort of indirectly quite a lot. Which is do you have to have lots of people included in your research to get good insight? And my answer to that is not really. And I think that’s because if you do research in a really structured way where you’ve really thought about who you speak to, and that they are representative of your audience, you actually don’t have to speak to that many people to get a good idea about things like, you know, whether or not people understand something or what kind of response you gonna get to something.

Obviously, that depends very much if there are cultural differences. There are differences within generations. So you have to think about who you go and talk to, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be loads and loads of people. Sometimes you get more from including longer conversations, richer conversations with smaller groups of people than you do from adding on more people to your research.

So it’s worth thinking about when you’re thinking about the budget.

I just had to stop and look at this amazing tree. It’s incredible. I just think it’s been there for a very long time.

Something that comes up quite often is whether or not you can do insight on a budget. Whether you can do anything if you really don’t have very much money or resource. And I’m an optimist, so I pretty much always think that you can do something to, to do some insight work to understand your audience better, to test things out, to understand the market, maybe.

There are lots of different ways you can do that on a budget, but there are some areas you really don’t want to skimp. And I think the most important of those is you don’t want to skimp on getting good quality data. And by that, I don’t necessarily mean that you have to have lots and lots of data.

But what you do need is data – the way you thought through, yeah, this represents the audience that I’m talking to or, you know, I’ve had in-depth conversations with them that have helped me understand what’s really going on for them. It’s not too surface level, or I’ve been able to go out to enough people where the numbers make sense to look at.

So I think you can do things on a budget. Sometimes, one of the best things to do is a bit of desk research, which now I think of it. I might do a little, little video on desk research because I feel like we don’t do enough of that. But yeah, don’t skimp on the data. Yes, you can do it on a budget. Don’t skimp on the data.

One of the things that I remember from early on in my insight sort of career was people talking a lot about CRM systems, customer relationship management systems, databases, basically, and feeling like a lot of time and energy of conversations revolved around them. And I wasn’t quite sure what the big deal was. So I thought I’d do this short video just to talk about them, really.

And I think, you know, they can be super useful because often you can record all the things that people have done with you, they’ve donated, they’ve bought something from a shop, whether they’ve responded to particular things that you’ve sent them. All really useful. And behavioural data is a really good predictor of what people are more likely to do next, better than them telling you.

But, it is a limited picture as well. You probably don’t record everything. You certainly don’t record everything they do, but you probably don’t record everything they do with you. You don’t get a picture of why they did it. Quite often people basically do the things that you ask them to do. So your own kind of program of mailings or emails or whatever.

It’s pretty influential in how people behave. So it’s a really useful data. Brilliant data. And that’s why people spend a lot of money and time capturing all that data, analysing it, putting it in a CRM system, buying a new CRM system that’s slightly better, but it’s not everything. There’s lots of other ways to do insight as well, and sometimes it’s really helpful to take a different route or join together several routes. Ok, that’s it.

One of the questions that people sometimes ask is when is a good time to do insight work? Like, what should prompt you to do a piece of insight work? And I think there are a couple of times when it’s a really good idea. So the first is where you’re working on something really new, really different to things that you’ve done before.

So you need to test them out a bit more with people and see if they resonate, if they work. It makes sense coming from you. That’s a good time to do it. Another time might be if you’re doing something where there’s quite a lot of resource or budget involved. So you need to know before you commit that whether the thing that you’ve got is working well.

There’s lots of instances where I’ve seen things not do well, even when budgets being spent on them, and a little bit of insight work at the beginning would have really helped. Another time to do insight work is if the audience is quite different to you or audiences that you know a lot about. So some sometimes you might be going out to very different sort of demographic.

And I think particularly if you’re trying to understand like barriers and motivations, reasons people might do things or not do things and the audience is different to you, then there’s nothing better than talking to their audience, listening to that audience and understanding where they’re coming from. It’s three good times to do insight work. There’s also, I would say, a time not to do insight work, and that’s when you won’t be able to act on the findings.

And it sounds a bit obvious to say that, but I think it’s worth a good consideration before you start on an insight project, because actually having the headspace to understand what you’re finding out. Figure out what it means to you. Communicate it. Act on it. If, as an organisation, you’re not in a place to do that, it’s probably not worth the budget and the spend to do the insight project? Certainly not right now. So that’s also one to watch out for.

Okay. This is a question that I never really get asked, but I feel like I should get asked, which is why don’t we do more desk research? Maybe I don’t get asked it because desk research is a bit of a funny kind of academic term, isn’t it? But what I mean is, why don’t we use the information that’s already there more?

And there is a lot of free information out there. You know, just googling can find you some of it. And the Office for National Statistics produce all sorts of information quite often if you’re in a sector where there’s a sector body, they all have done a lot of research. There’s a ton of academic research. Sometimes not the most exciting to read, but with lots of exciting nuggets buried in there.

And I think it would be good if we did more desk research, if we spent a bit more time sort of seeing what was out there first. It really helps to shape, you know, if you’re doing an insight project to sort of start off with that. But also it can be really good for just checking and sense checking.

You know, if, for instance, you’re talking to people about fundraising and events fundraising, then, you know, sense checking those conversations against reports that are produced by people like Massive and Enthuse is a really helpful way to see, you know, what you’re finding. How does that match up across the sort of the market and what everyone else is experiencing? So I’m a big fan of desk research, and I think we should all do more of it.

Just walked past a man talking very loudly about tractors. So that was nice.