Are You Delivering Couch Potato Insights? Activation Workshops Can Help
I’m proud to be a part of the Ignite 360 team for many reasons, but the one that is at the top of my list is the thought and care we put into helping clients activate on Insights. Maybe it’s all the years I personally spent on the client side trying to do just that. Whether woven into a project from beginning to end or a stand-alone project, Insights Activations have become a popular tool we utilize to help our clients move their Insights Agendas forward in their organizations. Not only do corporate Insights Professionals need to be sound practitioners of the craft they must also be able to recognize opportunities to integrate learning into the business strategies and be internal influencers - skilled at securing support and sponsorship across the organization. Having skill in any one of these areas is impressive but all three? That is exceptional!
In my opinion the key to successfully activating on insights (and getting them “off the couch”) hinges largely on our ability to get key stakeholders immersed in the project early on. Easier said than done with our daily, competing priorities. Sometimes it feels easier to take the ball passed to you and just run with it. But, doing so usually makes the “sell-in” process at the end of a project much harder. I promise, if you begin with the end in mind, it will pay off.
And, while there isn’t one magic ticket to getting your organization in a position to act on new Insights, we’ve seen clients have great success influencing budgets, strategic planning, development timelines, and organizational priorities when they’ve built milestones and critical dialogue into the project timeline with those desired outcomes specifically in mind.
Ignite 360 insights activation workshops can help you get your insights off the couch and moving your business strategy forward
Our insights activation sessions are, of course, tailored to your specific goals, but we do have a few approaches that work well for almost all our clients. There is just no replacement for good, strategic dialogue with the team. And, while the days of huddling around a conference table at the office may not be as near as we’d like, I am proud to say we have successfully led many of these sessions with clients in a virtual format. In fact, these discussions can often be more expansive, diverse, and economical by leveraging technology and the virtual environment, to bring in stakeholders who may not have had a chance otherwise to influence the conversation.
The 3 types of activation workshop sessions
Hypothesis Session
These sessions bring your team together at the beginning of the project. The purpose? To ground the team in established learning and identifying hypotheses to test in the research. While Ignite 360 facilitates the session, it is quite common for clients to present prior work, data, and case studies to the group. Together we explore the initial hypotheses and connect them to key questions to be answered in the coming field work. This is a great way to get your stakeholders to help craft the learning agenda. The outcome of this session will be not only a shared understanding of the learning objectives, but also clarity on critical questions that need to be answered to influence action in your organization.
Synthesis Session
At the end of the project, we leverage materials from the research – often both transcripts and video to facilitate a workshop that brings the learning together for your team. This includes the research, key learnings, and top insights. One of the things I love most about these sessions is they give your team more exposure to not only what we learned, but who we learned from – the consumers. We try to always include an element of consumer immersion in these sessions as they create a real opportunity to transfer empathetic understanding into your organization. We also get the team collaborating on business opportunities and implications to ensure there is a general consensus on the learning and the next steps toward activation.
Application Session
During an application session the Ignite 360 team formally presents the research report and leads a discussion with your team to identify opportunities for application of the Insights. In many cases, we partner with you to utilize your established decision criteria when evaluating priorities and possibilities for the business (and budgets!). If needed, we’ll create a bespoke framework to guide your team in the discussion, taking into consideration both the business and consumer impacts. This helps the team blend data, insight and intuition into their go-forward recommendations. The outcome of the session will be identification of the opportunity space for your business, a roadmap and clear requirements for success.
We think it’s a really smart move to build a reciprocal relationship with your key stakeholders. Let them in to advise on key objectives and be a part of the strategic dialogue throughout the project and they’ll be better positioned to help YOU INFLUENCE the business to act on your recommendations! In fact, if you’d like to access some of the storytelling tools we’ve created to help clients, check out the Ignite 360’s Storymasters Series archive for tools, tips, and tricks that go beyond the why directly to the how, so you can become a storymaster.
Insights professionals are in a unique position to advise on the future direction of the business.
But they can’t go it alone. We can help you engage your stakeholders and position the group to activate on insights and drive the business forward.
I’d love to talk with you about how we can partner. Email me at marie@ignite-360.com