Getting your research findings heard, understood, and used should always be your goal. That means more than putting findings into a report deck, presenting results to the marketing team, writing up press releases, or getting media placement for a PR story. It means having your audience engage with it by thinking, sharing, and taking action.…
Data visualization will likely be one the biggest areas of innovation and development over the next several years. This is a good. A chart that clearly and succinctly displays detailed data in a way that captures the viewer’s attention and helps interpret the data can be incredibly powerful. Edward Tufte, a pioneer in this area,…
Two paragraphs can be exceptionally thought provoking when they get right to the point. In a simple introduction to the New York Times Book Review some time ago, the editors highlighted two ideas about statistics and stories worth sharing.
Making sense of data and statistics is not just a matter of being clear and precise, nor is it just a matter of keeping things simple (though all of these are important). To make numbers really compelling, we need to relate them to people’s experiences. If we want our audience to grasp the importance of…
On Monday I received media training from one of the research industry’s top professional organizations: The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). They hired Brenda Foster, a career journalist and now a communications and PR consultant, to teach research nerds about how to succeed with media interviews when talking about research findings. First she…
An article in The New Yorker claimed that a hundred years ago most Americans died in their mid-fifties. Alas, they were fooled by a statistic and the claim is not true.
If you need super-fast, super-cheap (but rigorous) research insights for thought leadership content, the just-published Versta Research Summer Newsletter is for you. It features an article, How to Use Surveys for Thought Leadership on a Shoestring Budget, that describes (in a video!) a new DIY process we used to launch ten extremely fast snapshot surveys…
Thank you for your interest in our July 16, 2020 presentation at the Quirk’s Event! Here is the deck we used for that presentation. Feel free to download and circulate. Soon, we will have a full video of the presentation available, as well. It will be part of the Summer 2020 Versta Research Newsletter. If…
We have experimented with different styles and formats for reporting research results over the years, including traditional report decks, animated PowerPoint, infographics, headline reports, whitepapers, and live (sometimes video-recorded) presentations. But we have never quite taken the step of creating a video report as the primary presentation of research findings. A client just did it…
Our school teachers were right: Learning how to write effectively makes a huge difference if your job involves communication. This applies to market research and marketing. Improving your writing will help you write better reports, better surveys, and better campaigns. It’s not that hard. You need not learn the art of essays, novels, dissertations, or…