How to Get More From Research You've Already Paid For

You've already paid for research that could change a decision. It's sitting in a shared drive.

Getting more from it rarely needs new fieldwork. It needs the findings re-cut for the people who can act on them.

Signs a study is under-used

• It was presented once, to the team that commissioned it.
• Leadership saw a summary written by someone else.
• The teams it affects have never opened it.
• People still ask questions the study already answered.
• The plan it was meant to shape went ahead without it.

If two or more of those are true, the research hasn't failed. It hasn't been activated.

Why it's worth going back

The expensive part of research is already done. You've paid for the design, the fieldwork and the analysis. What's missing is the cheapest part: getting it in front of people in a form they'll use.

Commissioning a new study to answer a question the old one already covered is the costly route. Start with what you have.

Six steps to activate research you already have

1. Find the decision. What was the study meant to inform? Is that decision still open, or is there a new one it speaks to? If you can't name a decision, stop here and find one.
2. Pull the findings that matter. Not all 30 slides. The three findings that would change what someone does. If you're not sure which they are, ask what you'd say if you had one minute with the chief executive.
3. Name who needs each one. Leadership, marketing, product, customer experience, client teams. Each finding has an owner. Write the name next to it.
4. Re-cut it into formats they'll open. A three-minute podcast for the director. A three-line Slack brief for the team. A one-page visual for the wall. See insight activation examples.
5. Put it where they already are. Email, internal presentations, the intranet, a team meeting. Don't send a link to the shared drive. That's where it's been all along.
6. Run one session to turn it into a plan. A short workshop where the people who own the decision agree what changes, and who does it.

Check it's still current

Research ages. Before you re-use a study, ask:

• When was the fieldwork done?
• Has the market, the product or the audience changed since?
• Was the sample the audience you need to understand now?

If the answers are uncomfortable, treat the findings as a hypothesis to test, not a fact to act on. Say so when you share them. A finding presented with its limits is more useful than one presented as certain.

What you can do yourself

Steps one to three need no specialist skills. Anyone who knows the business can find the decision, pick the findings and name the owners. If you do nothing else, do those three and send a three-line summary to each owner.

Steps four to six are where it gets harder. Scripting audio, cutting video and designing a single page that holds up against the data are production jobs. This is the work that lands on insight teams after a debrief and rarely gets finished.

When you do need new research

Activation won't fix a study that asked the wrong question or spoke to the wrong people. If the research can't answer the decision in front of you, no format will change that.

You need new research when:

• The decision has changed and the old questions don't cover it.
• The audience you need wasn't in the sample.
• The market has moved enough that the findings no longer hold.

What the old study will tell you is what to ask next time. And next time, plan the activation before the fieldwork. We explain how in the Insight Activation framework.

Bring us a study you've already run

This is where a lot of our conversations start. Bring us a study you've already run and we'll show you how we'd activate it: which findings we'd lead with, who needs them, and what formats we'd make.

That's Insight Activation in practice. If you want to understand why the study went unused in the first place, read why nobody read your last research report.

The report is the raw material. You've already paid for it.