A casual introduction to our data, research and public policy work

When I introduce myself with: “I’m a data, research and public policy consultant”

I often get: “Woah, that sounds like a lot!”

This is pretty much what someone said to me yesterday at a networking event. Side note: it was probably one of the best networking events I’ve gone to in a while, where I could authentically be myself; so shout out to Keep Calm and Connect (KCC) networking events and Sue Richards for inviting me to the one held in Queen's Park, London.

We often get asked about our experience and what we do, and I recognise that most people I know in my everyday world wouldn’t understand what it is we do in the same way that past colleagues or peers might. I would divide our work into three areas of focus: data analytics and strategy, research and insight work, and public policy and strategy planning.

As per the Cambridge Dictionary, data is defined in Business English as “information, especially facts or numbers, collected to be examined and considered and used to help with making decisions” (Cambridge Dictionary, data). Therefore, data analytics and strategy is about focusing on your return on investment. You want to measure whether the activities, money, time, effort, and other resources that you put in are paying off or not for your short, medium, and/or long-term goals. This still works well with the other areas when you need to outline and define potential impact, costs and benefits for different policy and operational options. When we say data analytics, this area of work will cover everything from collecting the data, cleaning it up (making sure there are no mistakes or double-counting!), analysing it, making sense of it in a report or presentation, and/or finding ways of managing the data so you can continuously review (i.e. dashboards).

Research and insight work focuses on learning and decision making. You want to learn from and understand a certain issue or situation, usually for decision-making purposes. This may often go hand-in-hand with data analytics & strategy work and/or public policy & strategic planning, but it requires its own work too separately in order to inform public policy decisions and options and/or to provide context to data analytics work. When I talk about research work, it could be anything from a jurisdictional scan to see what other comparable organisations are doing about the same issue (I have done a lot of these in my time in local government by calling, emailing and/or Googling what other organisations) to writing a whole report on a topic to try to make it easier and accessible to understand on a broader organisational level (ask me about the time I worked on a report discussing civility in the workplace as an example there).

Again, I will refer to the Cambridge Dictionary when looking at the definition of policy in Business English: “a set of ideas, or a plan of what to do in particular situations, that has been agreed officially by a group of people, a business organisation, a government, or a political party” (Cambridge Dictionary, policy). Public policy and strategic planning focuses on the external environment, and how this impacts you as an organisation, sector or profession. While this often goes hand-in-hand with research and insight, you focus particularly on this when external forces affect your operations more than your own internal forces because:

• Your work is heavily regulated by public policy and legislation. Regulatory bodies exist to protect the public by ensuring that professionals meet certain standards of competence and conduct. You can check which professions are regulated here on the Gov.UK website: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/check-which-professions-are-regulated-in-the-uk. These tend to be professions where there is a lot of education and/or there are serious implications for the work they do on public health (i.e. doctors and veterinarians), protecting vulnerable groups of people (i.e. teachers) and/or your financial and physical well being (i.e. accountants and engineers respectively). If this interests you, you can read more at Gov.UK at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/professions-regulated-by-law-in-the-uk-and-their-regulators/uk-regulated-professions-and-their-regulators

• Your work is affected deeply by the long-term, because the organisation is working on long-term goals including socioeconomic and/or environmental change such as charities, nonprofits and/or social impact businesses and multinational and larger companies who see themselves as industry leaders.

Again, I will refer to previous experience here that you can ask me about, like when cannabis was legalised in Canada when I worked with a social housing provider at the time so we had to update our smoking policy; or when I contracted with Civil Service in the UK on developing post-Brexit animal product trade policies and procedures.

Every client and organisation we meet has different concerns and is experiencing different issues at different times. Sometimes, you might need all three of these types of work to be done at once, and sometimes you will need just one or two activities to be done. No matter what you need, or if you’re not sure what you need - come talk to us. Often we will help you find similarities to previous experiences and can help you unravel what you’re looking at and make sense of it.

As New Happy Co. illustrates this beautifully here: “it has to feel like this [chaos]… before it feel like this [calm]”