Improving internal marketing about new and upcoming research — to get more done with insights
Integrating research > Expanding reach and connectivity > B. Turning up research communications > Article B2
NOTE: This earlier article series has pivoted into ‘Stop Wasting Research’ book for Rosenfeld Media > Subscribe for updates (monthly at most)
If a tree falls in the forest… Many research teams in tech are looking to repository tooling to grow their reach — often before they improve their internal marketing within the existing channels that current and potential stakeholders already use.
Let’s not skip the operational basics. Continuous improvement of researchers’ communications about their present-tense projects can have outsized impacts, setting the stage for broader insight operations.
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When great researchers take on projects, they work hard to bring partners and stakeholders along for the ride through a set of structured communications about their work. But even researchers who are relatively good at getting the word out may not be consistently communicating across relevant phases of their processes: from initial project exploration, to calls for involvement, to early reflections on data collected, to notes on collaborative work round emerging insights, to ready-to-apply reporting shared through multiple touch points and channels.
Talking to research teams about how they activate their research, I’ve heard a lot of “we could do better” regarding their study communications. Not that their current state is ‘radio silence,’ but there’s an acknowledgment that marketing of research into their organization is not consistent or programmatic.
Sent to too small an audience, without an opportunity to sign up for more information. Sent too late in the process to actually participate. Sent in a format that didn’t connect with product people. Sent just after another researcher conducted very similar research, creating accidental redundancy. Sent with too little information and not a strong enough teaser or call to action. Sent full of jargon that’s hard to decipher. Sent one time during a project instead of telling an ongoing story. Sent to broad audiences as a series of disconnected communications, without any sense making across the research community’s recent projects. Sent as an occasionally completed checklist item, rather than a consistent operational project that’s the subject of ongoing improvements.
When considering the breadth of product people who should be connected to ongoing streams of research-in-process, it seems that many research teams effectively run their projects in small-team ‘stealth mode.’ How can research become a primary generator of product planning in an organization if its product people don’t have their finger on the pulse of what’s being learned?
Turning up communications about research process doesn’t mean flooding too many inboxes with overly-templated noise. Carefully crafted communication can connect different spheres of audience at the ‘right’ frequency, alerting them to what’s coming soon, where and how they might plug in, what’s being learned, and what’s going to be done with insights. Consistent communications can drive more collaboration and a larger ‘impact radius’ (B1) for research teams. And as a prelude to bigger research operations initiatives, once a research community is on the path to optimizing the visibility and uptake of their latest research, they will be in a better position to advocate for new investments, such as research repository programs.
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Improving your insight operations
Get more done with your research community’s insights by:
- Assigning an owner to audit and improve research marketing
Find someone who’s passionate about the organizational reach of research, and convince them to own an intentional program of improvement and support of research communications. Hold regular working sessions to discuss marketing progress as well as opportunities to evolve templates and processes. To keep motivation up, keep the research community in the loop about resulting communication wins. - Floating upcoming topics and opportunities to participate
It’s a truism for a reason: the easiest path for integrating research into planning is to have relevant product people directly involved in the research process as owners. Your marketing program can aim to increase fruitful involvement from needed stakeholders. - Trickling out session stories and early insights
Multiple touch points with research learning are often needed to shift mindsets and motivate product plans. One way to add touch points is to more consistently report out ‘stories from the field’ or ‘stories from the lab’ during data collection, when applicable — stories that will be the subject of more complete analysis and reporting later in each research project. - Crafting new insight announcements that clearly frame problems to solve
Research communities can hone how they write actionable insights, shaping standards and new consistencies across research outputs. These new consistencies can increase the legibility and impact of individual research projects. They are also an early step toward more intensive forms of collaborative work, growing a shared body of knowledge within a research repository. - Pulling together individual messages into aggregate communiques for larger audiences
To provide additional touch points and reach broader audiences, research marketing can roll up sets of individual, study-specific messages into summary ‘newsletter’ reports, adding a level of sense making to recent research happenings. To accelerate the flywheel of research impact, these summaries can celebrate newly informed design proposals, resulting product plans, and any immediate impact stories — creating social currency and growing norms for insight use. - Your idea here…
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On the path from insight to product impact
Improving internal marketing about upcoming and new research is part of product teams achieving awareness of possible planning targets from their research. It’s also related to collecting what’s deemed to be sufficient evidence, as well as usefully articulating resulting insights.
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Let’s connect
If you’ve read this far, please don’t be a stranger. I’m curious to hear about your challenges and successes continuously improving how your researchers market their work. Thank you!
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Related posts
- B1. Growing research ‘impact radius’ by connecting learning to more internal product audiences– to get more done with insights
- A2. Aiming for integrated research, not just a research repository tool
- A4. [On Re+Ops Community Medium] Opening the gates: Addressing researchers’ concerns about broadening access to research repositories
- View list of all ‘Integrating Research’ posts (and upcoming topics)
Selected references
- “Communicate often and broadly… Most of the leaders I spoke with felt that researchers did a good job of communicating to product teams but fell short when it came to communicating more broadly. Techniques discussed for proliferating insights more broadly included creating communications, like newsletters, or getting a spot in a broader company newsletter and posting insights or reports to Slack channels to raise awareness. Extending the invitation for research read outs to employees in the company beyond the project team is one easy action to foster wider proliferation of insights. The most common communication strategy is to go where the eyeballs are in the organization — Slack, Confluence, email, presentations, newsletters were all mentioned.” Robin Beers
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/research-leaders-what-we-up-robin-beers/?trackingId=hFw6DeZrShulXixzClBX9Q%3D%3D - “Internal Communications” — which includes “Platforms for socialising research,” “Quarterly reports,” and “Information architecture” — is one part of the larger scope of activities captured as part “A framework for #WhatisResearchOps” Kate Towsey
https://medium.com/researchops-community/a-framework-for-whatisresearchops-e862315ab70d - “…one of our key jobs as researchers is developing our design and engineering partners’ buy-in. There are many ways to become a more effective communication partner, including learning how to convey research results as a story. But direct experience is even more memorable than a story well told.” Sheetal Agarwal
https://medium.com/microsoft-design/directions-in-user-research-1b6458338213
