“Data” is currently a buzzword, showing up in discussions across industries. These discussions are filled with recurring questions about how to use the data: How do we gather more insights from data to drive strategy? What sources can we gather data from? And, most importantly, how do we do it ethically?
When speaking about “the age of data,” it can conjure up visions of giant warehouses packed floor to ceiling with computer servers, filled with the hum of vast amounts of data being processed by machines, with hardly a person in sight. “Data” can feel removed from the very people it is gathered from. With the push to gather ever more data at a faster pace, it’s even more crucial to be able to dive deep and wrestle with the opinions, preferences, and lives of the people behind the data.
These conversations are nothing new to DCG. Research has been central to DCG’s approach since its inception, enabling our skilled communications and design professionals to further tailor messaging for our clients to effectively address their target audiences. We consider our research to be “respondent-centric,” meaning the data that we gather relies on the voices of our audiences to tell us what is important and relevant to them. When we understand our audiences, we can craft messaging that meets them where they’re at.
Using the many tools in our tool belt, we layer and stack bespoke approaches to produce more nuanced insights for our clients. DCG gathers insights from populations both domestically and internationally, including hard-to-reach populations, to craft strategies that use authentic communication pathways. DCG has consistently leveraged digital and virtual data collection methods, even prior to the COVID-19 shutdowns, having operated as a hybrid workforce from the start. Using literature reviews and expert interviews to avoid reinventing the wheel, multilingual surveys to understand perspectives at scale, and focus groups with both the general public and niche populations, we can source answers to some of our clients’ most pressing questions.
Our research efforts have enabled our clients to streamline their data management approaches, organize vast longitudinal datasets across diverse cohorts, and improve operational effectiveness by leveraging data to optimize practices. In this new age of data, we are looking towards building new capabilities that will help us better tell people’s stories. AI and other digital tools are no longer just novelties, but crucial systems we integrate into our everyday work. When used appropriately, they have proven to complement our existing workflows in two key ways:
- Freeing up more time for us researchers to analyze and think deeply about the data.
- Engaging with the richness of the data itself.
Some recent ways that our team has been leveraging digital tools, and AI in particular, to advance our work with data and research are:
- Validating codebooks to streamline existing codes and identify additional potential codes during qualitative analysis,
- Creating templates for reporting to ensure consistency of voice across multiple writers,
- Facilitating reviews of written analyses alongside raw data to ensure we’re not overlooking any crucial viewpoints, and
- Brainstorming on focus group discussion guides to tailor lines of questioning in ways we might not have thought about to best answer research questions.
As DCG moves into a new era of digital capabilities, we look forward to further bolstering our established research practice by developing additional multimodal research capabilities and new technical expertise to help us tell even more stories through data.
