Creating impact with insights
Key to the success and ROI of an Insight Community is making sure that the insights you generate create an impact internally and are acted upon. The more people see and use your outputs, the more authority and visibility the Insight Community has as a source of information, the more stakeholder involvement and usage there is, and the more the community is valued.
Good communication of insights is often referred to as ‘storytelling’ and is of critical importance for insights; Insight Platforms describe how it can “boost insight activation and cultivate better reports“.
What is storytelling?
Good storytelling starts with selecting the right output for your insights and choosing the right output means knowing your audience. The best output is not necessarily the most polished deliverable, it’s the format most likely to help a particular audience understand, share and act on insight. The same piece of insight might need to be translated into different formats for different audiences. A senior stakeholder might need a one-page summary whilst an insight user might value an interactive dashboard. A wider internal audience may engage more readily with a short video or infographic.
We recommend considering aspects such:
- Audience: who needs to receive and understand the insight?
- Outcome: what decision or action does the insight need to support?
- Shareability: does the insight need to travel beyond the primary audience e.g. be shared with staff or volunteers?
Which outputs work best?
Infographics: Get your insight across in an instant. A well-designed infographic is ideal for audiences with limited time or low exposure to a project who should still understand the top-level insight. They’re an easily shareable visual asset that can make insight memorable and help it move through an organisation.
Executive summaries/action documents: For senior staff members you may want a more formal document than an infographic e.g. a single-sheet document or short presentation giving the core insights and recommendations. Here is where a storytelling approach – “What do I need to know? Why should I believe you? Why should I care?” – is crucially important to communicate the key points in a well-evidenced and emotionally convincing way.
Community reports: The executive summary can also form part of a longer report in Word or PowerPoint which can go into more depth on both the insights and how they were obtained. The report is a more comprehensive record of the project designed for stakeholders with a closer interest in it and also as a basic document the team can refer to in future.
Dashboards: A reporting dashboard with KPIs, recent posts and content, and core statistics can be a useful way of sharing data especially for ongoing multi-wave or multi-country projects, where stakeholders might want to dig into different views of the data. The content of a dashboard needs to be carefully calibrated. It will be a major point of interface between the Insight Community and the wider business. It needs to be easy to use and interpret, with visual appeal. A dashboard that’s too cluttered is difficult to usefully interpret.
Interactive presentations or microsites: These allow audiences to choose their own route through a story, or review a presentation in their own time and at their own pace. Interactivity is valuable when stakeholders need to explore the data but it shouldn’t replace a clear, human-led account of what matters.
Video: Video is one of the most powerful Insight Community storytelling tools, both internally and externally. Video is great for community outputs. It adds authenticity, richness, and variety, as well as humanising insights and bringing customers and their experiences to life. Some video output types we use are:
- Customer vox pops that bring lived experience into decision-making
- Short showreels that create an emotional connection with data
- Narrated summaries of reports or debrief for time-poor stakeholders
- Audio or podcast-style summaries where listening is more convenient than reading
And finally: every output format should be well and consistently designed. For long-term Communities it’s well worth producing output templates as you would for any other packaged research product, and a “look and feel” guide with notes on images, fonts, colours, tone of voice, language, and so on.
About the author
Hannah Downs is Head of Insight at STRAT7 Researchbods where she helps brands use insight communities to build closer customer relationships, deliver faster, more cost-effective insight and translate understanding into meaningful business impact.
