We could open with the funding gap in the charity sector, the stretched insight teams, the important questions that never get answered because the budget isn’t there. But honestly, that’s not the real reason we care about this work.
The truth is this is personal. Jo sat on the research board of a small charity, helping shape what research they did and how to reduce the burden on participants. Sam volunteers front of house at South Hill Park Arts Centre, having been a paying guest there for years before deciding to give something back. And Roseann has volunteered for the NSPCC delivering safeguarding workshops in schools.
None of this is for show. Several of us have had front-row seats to what a cancer diagnosis does to a family, or know the particular grief of watching someone disappear into dementia. We’ve seen first-hand what the NSPCC can do for a child who needs it most. When you’ve seen the difference a charity makes on someone’s worst day, you want to do something useful in return.
For us, that something is research.
We’re not doing this to just to ‘look good’
We bring the same curiosity and rigour to charity work that we’d bring to any commercial brief. The difference is that we often know this world from the inside, as volunteers, family members, fundraisers. That changes how we listen. And it means that when the findings land, we’re not just ticking off a deliverable, we’re thinking about what happens next and how changes can have an immediate impact on people’s lives.
On Budgets: Let’s Be Honest
We know charity budgets aren’t commercial budgets, and that the brief in our inbox may have taken months of internal persuasion to get approved. We apply discounts because we believe good research shouldn’t be reserved for those with the biggest wallets, and we scope projects that are genuinely fit for purpose, not stripped back to the point of uselessness.
Inclusive Research Isn’t Optional
The people most affected by an issue are often the hardest to reach through traditional research. As award-winning DE&I practitioners, we know a study that doesn’t account for who it excludes isn’t just incomplete, it’s actively misleading. That matters most in the charity sector, where the mission so often centres on the very communities research tends to overlook.
What We’re Here to Do
We’re here because this work is meaningful, because our team brings lived experience that makes us better at it, and because we believe the organisations doing the most important work in our society deserve insight that is rigorous, inclusive, and genuinely useful.
If you’re a charity with a research challenge, whether it’s understanding your supporters, reaching underrepresented communities, developing new services, or making sense of a complex audience, we’d love to talk.
Not as a favour. As partners.