We help organizations set up dialogue systems, to improve communications between them and their audiences. Most of our work is with media organizations, broadcasters, publishers, arts organizations, educational institutions, and aid agencies.
Our work is centred around audience research, including training, facilitation, editing, monitoring, evaluation, web development, usability testing, and human systems development. It's a wide variety of work, but it all shares an emphasis on:
- feedback and interactivity, and
- training people to develop their own capacities.
We work out of Adelaide, Australia, on a worldwide basis. Though we're a small consultancy, in the last few years we have worked for clients in Asia, Africa, and Europe, as well as Australasia.
Recent activities
Lately, this is what we've been doing most:
- Setting up creative feedback systems: how to learn the most from your audience, clients, or customers.
- Using qualitative futures techniques, we help organizations improve their planning processes, to better prepare for unexpected contingencies.
- Setting up audience research and evaluations systems in developing countries, and training broadcasters in the creative use of data.
- Testing web sites with their target audiences, to evaluate their usability and effectiveness, and suggesting improvements.
- Recently we've started applying the methods of web site usability testing to printed documents - resulting in major improvements to their usability.
- Internet surveys: carrying out web-based surveys and constructively reporting their results.
We also do Internet-related work, mostly in Australia. This includes site development, training, marketing, and usability and effectiveness testing. See the pages on our
internet services.
Our approach
We approach situations in a different way from most marketing or research companies...
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Rather than do all your research for you, we help you set up feedback systems. If applied well, informal research can be almost as valuable as elaborate surveys.
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A one-off survey is not enough to keep an organization in touch with its clients. Setting up a dialogue system is vital. We help with that.
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Statistics are only as good as the meaning behind the numbers. We often find qualitative research more useful than number-crunching.
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Our reports use whatever format will communicate best: written reports, computer-based presentations, posters, even videos. We present not just figures, but solidly backed recommendations.
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Many consultancies have house styles, and standardized ways of approaching problems. We believe that our strength is flexibility: we listen creatively, to solve your specific problems. (Yes, we know a lot of organizations claim to be more flexible than they really are - but take a look at the variety of our case studies and judge for yourself.)
