Hive mind

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“If you could create a hypothetical room where all the brains working in insight and evaluation across government sat together answering questions, wouldn’t that be amazing?” muses Catherine Hunt, head of insight and evaluation at the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Office, who has spent a large amount of time figuring out how to create just such a vault of collective intelligence.

Crowdsourcing knowledge from across government and its agencies isn’t simply about being efficient, however – “because these are hard problems, and there isn’t a simple answer”, adds Hunt, who has had an unconventional route into a senior government insights role.

Her journey began when she applied for the Civil Service Fast Stream, to keep a friend company – although she didn’t take the job at that point. After a law degree, a few years working in strategic planning in the ad industry, and leading insight for Harper Collins, Hunt felt that her business with government wasn’t quite finished (both of her parents worked in local government).

So she took a role at the Central Office of Information to improve evaluation in government, later moving to the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Office communications. After a career break with her family in New York, Hunt returned to the government in the summer of 2016, a month after the EU referendum. “The Brexit vote happened in my last week in the States,” she says. “Three years out of the country and I thought: ‘Blimey, that was unexpected.’”

More than two years on, how is Brexit affecting her work? “It’s difficult and it can be sobering – but it’s a fascinating time to be listening to public opinion and finding a way to boil it down into impactful recommendations for government,” she says, adding that Brexit has highlighted the importance of people working in research not getting caught up in their own bubbles.

“We got where we are because people like us didn’t listen to people who were not like us.”

Hunt’s role spans three main areas. First, insight: understanding public mood, attitudes and reaction. Second, the evaluation of government campaigns, including any worth more than £100,000, which must go through the ‘pass process’ looked after by her team.

They also oversee best practice, and work with departments to set standards for insights and evaluation across government. This is an important role because, while some departments – such as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – have large insight teams, others might have one person working on a part-time basis.

As part of the Government Communication Service’s (GCS’s) wider Engage programme, which looks to ensure campaigns are data-driven, backed by research and, ultimately, more effective, Hunt is involved in Basecamp. This cross-government network began life as an insight and evaluation hub, but has grown to around 540 members in various roles across government.

She also chairs a regular insights and evaluation forum for those heading insights in government and its arms-length bodies. “We all work for the same employer – the Crown – but in different organisations; we don’t have a common intranet,” explains Hunt. “It’s a bit like a sci-fi film; every time you pick something up to look at it, someone in a parallel universe is looking at exactly the same thing – if only we both knew about it.”

In addition to driving efficiencies, Basecamp is able to highlight that best practice sometimes comes from someone in a small organisation who has engineered an innovative approach to a problem. The platform allows them to talk around it and see where others could benefit from a similar approach. People can share their content and insights, so “it’s not just a single version of the truth”, says Hunt.

An obvious downside to sharing platforms is that championing transparency and accessibility for such a broad group of people can mean losing depth and specificity, as some sensitive information can’t be shared. In November 2018, the government launched its Knowledge Hub, formed from Basecamp, that allows ‘sub hubs’ to be added so more detailed information can be shared on specific campaigns, departments or areas of interest.

Hunt has been working with the Market Research Society to include content on the hub, to help those commissioning research within government, as part of MRS’s policy work on procurement best practice.

The hub includes functionality that enables the government’s media agency, Manning Gottlieb OMD – which took up the contract in November 2018 – to share results. Standardised metrics, used as part of wider GCS efforts to regularise evaluation across government, are coupled with digital dashboards within Knowledge Hub, and allow “proper benchmarks” for campaigns for the first time, according to Hunt.

“We’ve standardised categories of campaigns, which will enable you to ask, over the next couple of years: ‘What does ‘good’ look like?’; or ‘I’m trying to reach young people, where should I go and how should I do it?’ It moves beyond being just a community for us – it’s a community where we work collaboratively with our media agency.

“Our role is to make sure that all government comms is as efficient and effective as possible – and to do that, you need to know what is good.”

Mapping data

GCS has developed an interactive mapping tool that gives localised insight – based on data at a local authority level – to government professionals for campaign planning. This could, for instance, be someone working in a ministerial events team who is thinking about the best location for an announcement benefiting working families. “The tool allows a non-data specialist to blend data sets together on a UK map to identify places in the country against two or three criteria,” Hunt explains.

While new technologies help make such tools and a wider array of data sources possible, the storytelling aspect is down to the researchers.
“It has always been our job to tell stories using data, but now you have so much data – every comment someone makes about you on social media is a bit of qual data. You can test reaction overnight; you can marry real-time digital data with real-time polling data and know within a day how something went down. So you’ve gone from not enough data to potentially too much.”

Hunt believes this can be tackled by not falling into the trap of analysing everything just because you can. For example, the government is looking at how it uses textual analysis to interpret large-scale qual, but Hunt is aware of the dangers of relying on certain social intelligence tools, as they don’t understand nuance such as sarcasm.

“Some of the things that made us good researchers years ago – develop and test a hypothesis, guard against bias, make sure it’s representative – are still the same things that make us good researchers now.”

Different priorities

Constructive dialogue is key for Hunt when comparing the value of quick turnaround approaches versus long-term research with her colleagues in social research, who often work on long-scale evaluation and address big policy questions. Her priorities as a market researcher are more pragmatic.

“Through the evaluation framework we’ve created, and the segmentation we run, if money is spent 10% more efficiently, then we are spending public money more effectively and efficiently – that’s got to be a good thing.

“It’s about those constructive conversations where you realise that you need something different – both methodologies are often totally right. Quick turnaround to make something better, and long-term robust formative research are both really important.”

Hunt is also working with her analysis colleagues on the research marketplace, which relaunched in 2018. The new framework for market research procurement intends to create a more flexible pool of suppliers, of different sizes, and reflect how the industry
is shifting.

“We recognise that things are changing so quickly that we might not realise what those things are – and we recognise that any framework that closes down agencies and limits the number they can be on just makes it harder for small agencies.”

Hunt’s pragmatism extends to her own position, and that of her colleagues. Discussing the role of insight within government in future, she says: “We are only here because public money is paying for us to be here – and our job is to be the voice of the people who pay for us to be here. Brexit really made that clear.”

If researchers strike the balance of using that opportunity while not forgetting the basics of research, Hunt believes all will be well.

“As long as we don’t just disappear down a rabbit hole of using data to prove what we want to prove, I think it’s good,” she says.

“As long as we are really clear that the reason we are here is to be the objective voice of people who are not us. And if there’s ever been a time when that’s valuable – not just in the UK, but across the western world – it feels like now.”

Good behaviour

The Government Communication Service’s professional development team has produced a new set of guidelines for behavioural change, using some of the core principles of behavioural science combined with existing best practice.

Written by Laura de Molière from DWP’s behavioural science team alongside Catherine Hunt, the Health and Safety Executive’s Lester Posner and David Watson from the Department of International Trade, the guide has been updated following feedback that while the government’s behavioural science principles were being well applied in large campaigns, people struggled to know where to begin for smaller ones.

The guide sets out how to set objectives and use audience insight using the Com-B model, which says there are certain conditions that need to be met before behaviour change takes place: the first is capability, which relates to whether people have the right knowledge, skills and ability to make the desired change in behaviour.

Secondly, is the opportunity there for people to change their behaviour? This could be physical or social opportunity, looking at whether an audience has the right resources, systems and people around them to help them make changes.

Lastly, if the government wants people to change their behaviour, it needs to look at their motivation – whether they actually want to do something and have the right habits to be able to do so.

When creating and implementing a communications strategy, the guidelines suggest asking the following questions using the EAST model (easy, attractive, social and timely).

“We worked hard to translate the theory into something simple and practical,” says Hunt. “It’s about trying to find a way of boiling down the simple principles of Com-B into a set of simple principles anyone can use, so even if their activity is 5% better, it makes a difference.”

This article was first published in Issue 24 of Impact.