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BackOur areas of expertise include
Audience insight
Our audience insight will help you design more effective policies and services and more impactful interventions and communications.
Our team regularly works with service users, businesses, and stakeholders across the UK. We harness methods from across the qualitative toolbox to bring you deep insight into how your audience is thinking, feeling and behaving. Our in-depth explorations consider the detailed social, cultural, or organisational contexts in which people live to illuminate nuanced experiences and understand diverse perspectives. We employ a range of tools to facilitate this holistic approach including journey mapping, diaries and case studies. Our robust and systematic approach to the rich data we collect enables us to create bespoke tools for you to embed this insight across your organisation (such as typologies, segments, behavioural driver models, and process and journey maps) and we also create highly visual outputs to bring audiences to life for your stakeholders (such as videos, animations and toolkits).
Research with vulnerable and seldom heard groups
We specialise in reaching and engaging diverse and underrepresented groups, ensuring their voices are heard and valued in research initiatives.
Conducting research with vulnerable and hard-to-reach audiences demands an empathetic approach. We focus on building trust, fostering genuine connections, and adapting research strategies to suit the unique needs and contexts of each audience. Through targeted outreach, culturally sensitive methodologies, and community partnerships, we break barriers and create meaningful opportunities for participation. Our commitment to inclusivity and accessibility and ethical practices ensure that every voice contributes to comprehensive and impactful research and drives positive change in our society. Our partnerships with a range of specialist recruitment agencies, and experience conducting community and snowballing approaches, means we are able to reach a range of under-served audiences including service users, young people and the elderly, those experiencing homelessness, ethnic and religious minorities, and people with disabilities and health conditions.
Dialogue and deliberative research
Conducting public engagement involves creating structured spaces for open, inclusive, and informed discussions between stakeholders and the public on complex issues- such as climate change, advanced technologies, data sharing, and ethical issues.
We excel in designing and facilitating dialogue-based research methodologies that foster deep engagement and collective decision-making. Our approach involves creating safe and respectful environments where diverse perspectives can be shared and deliberated upon meaningfully. Through carefully crafted dialogue sessions, collaborative workshops, and participatory methods, we enable participants to contribute their experiences, values, and priorities to the research process. By combining qualitative analysis with deliberative frameworks, we generate useful insights and actionable recommendations that reflect the shared wisdom and consensus of participants. Whether it's community engagement, policy development, or organisational change, our expertise in dialogue and deliberative research empowers participants and stakeholders to co-create solutions and drive a more collaborative future.
Codesign work
Codesign involves collaborative partnerships between citizens, stakeholders and researchers to cocreate principles, approaches and solutions.
At Verian we champion codesign to ensure that research reflects the perspectives and priorities of all involved parties. Through collaborative workshop sessions and communities, and iterative feedback loops, we engage citizens and stakeholders as partners. By incorporating citizens' expertise and lived experiences of complex social issues, we develop solutions that are more relevant, feasible, and impactful within their communities and contexts. Codesign empowers citizens and stakeholders to work together as partners to shape policies, services, programmes and interventions by coauthoring actionable recommendations.
Online qualitative panels
Our online qualitative panels bring together a community of participants from across the UK for a sustained period of time.
This allows us to get to know and work with them in detail. We leverage digital platforms and their tools to create safe discussion spaces which facilitate the sharing of detailed lived experiences, and activities which help participants to think creatively about challenges their community might be facing. Online panels provide rapid insights from communities which are geographically dispersed (e.g. with health conditions) or too time poor to attend in-person workshops (e.g. teachers, business leaders). Our bespoke panels can explore any topic and we have covered a range of issues from social housing to environmental concerns as well as experiences of public sector and charity services. We ensure high retention rates by designing engaging and interactive activities and providing intensive participant support throughout the process.
Participatory research
Participatory research involves inviting community members, stakeholders, and experts into the research design process, ensuring that research aligns with community values, needs and priorities.
We embrace participatory approaches as we believe it is an effective way of ensuring diverse voices are heard, valued, and integrated into meaningful conversations. Through workshops, focus groups and online spaces we facilitate open dialogue, co-analysis, and co-creation of knowledge. Participants become co-researchers, contributing their expertise, experiences, and perspectives to shape research, interpret findings, and develop actionable recommendations. By embracing participatory research principles of inclusivity, collaboration, and empowerment, we create positive social impact and promote sustainable change rooted in community strengths and aspirations.