Bethan Blakeley: Bridging the gap

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Anyone who has read my articles (OK, rants) will know I’m very passionate about trying to bring analytics and research closer together – doing whatever I can, and taking tiny steps, to eliminate the current chasm between the fields and, more importantly, the people who sit in the two (often completely siloed) camps.

(I will warn you now, I refer to ‘analysts’ and ‘researchers’ here – and this is not the time or place to be debating analysts vs data scientists, or researchers vs insight specialists. That is another discussion for another day).

It turns out that I’m not on my own (breathes sigh of relief). The MRS, too, has decided this is important enough to become a focus and has created a sub-committee dedicated to this – the data analytics steering group. (Feel free to come back with ideas for more imaginative names!) The overarching, lofty purpose of the group is twofold:

1. Encourage and support those in the research industry to understand and collaborate more with analytics and analysts.
   
2. Showcase the research industry as an exciting, innovative and challenging industry for advanced analytical skills.

It’s clear there is a lot to be done here. To try to break this down further, we’ve split ourselves into three main workstreams:

1. Events – highlighting opportunities where it could be useful to have a presence.
   
2. Partnerships – pinpointing other organisations, alongside the MRS, with which it would be useful to build a collaboration, to help us get in front of a different audience. We’re already working closely with the advanced data analytics (ADA) group within the MRS, to work out where the boundaries are between what they do and what we do, and how we can co-create efficiently.
   
3. Editorial – creating and facilitating the creation of content, with a strong relation to the partnerships that are deemed useful and the events we want on our radar. This is where I sit.

Essentially, as a collective, we want to spark ideas; fire up some passion. Be in the right rooms with the right people, facilitating the right discussions. We’re currently debating how to measure success, and we’re struggling – as a group of evidence-based, number-minded individuals – to come to terms with the idea that we may not have any particular numeric key performance indicators to measure. That’s right, we’re a bunch of data-driven analysts trying to measure something unquantifiable.

Unquantifiable as it may be, that doesn’t make it any less important. As much as the overarching purposes here are huge and ambitious, I keep having to remind myself to break them down into smaller steps:

• Convincing one person to ask if they can see the details of the analysis
  
• Convincing a business analyst to think about the consumer mindset
  
• Convincing people to collaborate across fields of expertise, where perhaps they wouldn’t have done before
  
• Convincing everyone – anyone – in the collective industry of ‘insights’ (because, let’s be real, that’s what we’re all here to achieve) that these two fields belong together and can really complement each other.

Talking of convincing people… this is where you might come in. We’d love some more members for the group. We’re an odd (you know me, always honest), but friendly bunch, with a lot of passion – you’d be in good company. We have a huge mix of experience between us, some client-side, some agency-side, some a mix, all with varying degrees of expertise in analytics.

Even if direct participation isn’t your thing, we’d still love to hear from you. If you have ideas, feedback or thoughts, give us a shout. (Especially if you want to rant – my inbox is waiting. Feel free to contact me at bethanblakeley@boxcleverconsulting.com).

We have our own section on the MRS website (mrs.org.uk/data-analytics) , and although very much in its baby stages, we’re open to suggestions for future content that you might want to see or create. In fact, we’re open to (almost) anything. We’re at the start of this huge, overwhelming, daunting, but exciting journey, and if you want to be a part of it, in any way, big or small – we’re all ears. Watch. This. Space.

Bethan Blakeley is analytics director at Boxclever. She writes a regular column for Impact magazine and contributes to Research Live. This article was first published in the April 2023 issue of Impact.