It's alive!

Daniel Alexander-Head from Your Community has set up a bit of live social networking for those inside and outside of the conference.

FOLLOW THE CONFERENCE ON TWITTER - search under #AMSRS

FOLLOW AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE LIVE PHOTO BLOG - http://www.amsrs.posterous.com/

Your out-of-office assistant

One last tip for conference delegates – don’t forget to activate your out-of-office email reply.

Here’s a template for you if you’re in a hurry:

Thanks for your email. I’ll be attending the best AMSRS conference ever from Wednesday morning to Friday lunchtime this week.

You can try me on the mobile (your mobile number here), but I’ll be networking till my ears bleed in the breaks, so probably won’t remember to check my phone for messages.

And I’ll be partying till my feet ache on Wednesday and Thursday night, so please don’t expect much until I’m back in the office on (your return day here).

If your matter is urgent, please contact (name of poor sucker back in the office) on (poor sucker’s contact details).

20 20 24 hours to go

The Ramones were on to something there. (See here if you missed the late 70s.)

Today’s to do list:

• exhibitors to set up stalls and practice schpiels
• AMSRS crew to set up rego desk and showbags
• AV/tech crew to run through all slides and links
• delegates to shift work around so no distractions
• judges to meet and decide on Best Paper awards
• golfers to meet 12pm at Moore Park Golf Course
• speakers to rehearse their material one last time
• session chairs to review their papers and presenters
• chefs to start prepping ingredients for tomorrow’s dinner

It’s going to be big, folks. My oh my, yes yes it will.

Young Researchers and OPs streams go on sale

Another of the unique elements to this conference is the tailored streams for Operations folks and Young Researchers (<35yo or in the first five years of a research career).

In order to send numbers through the roof on these special streams, the price has been dropped to only $100 per person + GST.

This also gets you into the massive final session, including the dream panel, Pecha Kucha State of Origin and Anh Do (but doesn't include the end-of-conference drinks).

This will provide OPs and young researchers with

• exposure to new research methodologies
• broader understanding of the research Industry
• opportunity to see competitive products
• greater understanding of client needs
• the opportunity to discuss and challenge ideas with conference presenters

So come on tight wads, spend a little on your best and brightest - it's the best investment you can make!

(People who had already booked can bring someone for free, and both can go to the drinks too.)

Workshop 3: Evaluation for social change - traps, gaps & victory laps (Friday 2 October)

Evaluation asks questions that are fundamental to evidence-based decision making in government. How's it going? Is it working? Why (or why not)? Where to from here?

Done well, evaluation can be a very rewarding line of work that allows you, the researcher, to play a significant role in shaping and measuring social progress.

However, evaluation can also be a tricky business. Big questions, multiple research methods and complex stakeholder relationships are just the beginning, and there’s often a lot at stake.

This workshop is designed as an introductory to intermediate session for researchers who want to become evaluators and evaluators who want to refine their craft.

It will cover things like:

• designing evaluation frameworks using the ‘program logic’ approach
• different types of evaluation - process, outcome, impact etc
• planning your evaluation approach, including methods like desktop research, analysis of existing data, stakeholder consultation and expert comment
• managing evaluation projects – from the simple to the complex
• bringing it all together – analysis and generation of evidence-based recommendations
• the finished product – writing reports to a publishable standard
• engaging and collaborating with clients who are new to research and evaluation (eg policy officers, program managers)
• a brief wrap of the highlights from the September 2009 Australasian Evaluation Society Conference.

Workshop attendees can send through inquiries or specific questions in advance to drintoul@urbis.com.au.

The workshops are staying at the bargain (early bird) price of $352 for AMSRS members / $440 for non-members. Click here to register now.

About the presenters:

Alison Wallace is one of Australia’s leading evaluators and is chairing the Evaluation parallel session on Thursday morning. As the National Director of Social Planning and Social Research at Urbis, she has lead dozens of large and high profile evaluations over the last 20 years in fields such as children’s services, homelessness, mental health, family violence, aged care, Indigenous health, law reform and education.

Duncan Rintoul has worked with Alison for the last nine years and is co-Chairing the 100 Stories conference. He has run training for the UNSW School of Social Science and the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and won the 2005 George Camakaris award for his AMSRS conference paper Not for prophesy: the impact of social research and evaluation on not-for-profit organisations.

Workshop 2: Recent developments in multiple correspondence analysis (Friday 2 October)

This workshop is a special opportunity to spend half a day with Michael Greenacre, arguably the father of correspondence analysis (a very widely used graphical analysis technique in the marketing and social research industry).

Michael is one of the world’s leading statisticians, and currently Professor of Statistics at the Universtat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is widely published, including his book “Correspondence Analysis in Practice”, now in its 2nd edition.

Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) is the extension of simple correspondence analysis (CA) to questionnaire-style data, based on many variables or questions that have categorical response scales. After summarizing the basic properties of MCA and its limits of interpretation, Michael will show us some recent developments which are especially useful for:

• handling missing data without having to exclude respondents who have a mixture of substantive responses and missing ones
• investigating patterns of specific response categories, for example the 'middle' response category ('neither agree nor disagree'; 'neither important nor unimportant'; etc...)
• partialling out certain response styles such as aquiescence (ie tendency to agree with everything).

Michael's keynote address at the Conference (Wednesday morning) will look at a different topic - the exciting rise of 3D dynamic perceptual mapping in marketing and social science research.

Further general information about Michael and the workshop can be obtained from Scott MacLean, Lewers Research, tel 03 9826 4755.

The workshops are staying at the bargain (early bird) price of $352 for AMSRS members / $440 for non-members. Click here to register now.

Workshop 1: How to become a business strategist and trusted adviser to clients (Friday 2 October)

One of the greatest challenges for researchers is making the transition from being a researcher to being a business strategist and becoming a trusted adviser to clients on business strategy, not just a provider of research.

One person who has very successfully made this transition is Andy Dexter, and Andy will be able to pass on his wisdom in a half day workshop on Friday 2 October. The workshop was originally advertised as being ‘The Transition from Qual Researcher to Business Strategist’ and it will focus more on the qualitative side of the business, but it will be useful for any researcher wanting to move up the food chain.

Andy Dexter is coming over from the UK to be a Keynote Speaker at the 2009 Conference, and we have persuaded him to stay to facilitate this workshop. So it is a unique opportunity for you to pick his brain. And what a brain to pick!

Andy has walked away from several UK and European market research conferences with awards for best paper, best presentation, and best new thinking. He has some firm views about how research should be undertaken and communicated to clients, and doesn’t pull his punches.

Andy is also a highly successful businessman. He is a former CEO of one of the UK’s leading agencies, he took Incepta Marketing Intelligence (now Illuminas) to Top Ten status in the UK, and won Marketing Magazine’s Research Agency of the Year in 2004. Then Andy took up the challenge of establishing his own agency, called Truth, and it has reached the dizzy heights of 4 million pounds turnover inside two years. As we would expect from Andy, Truth is different. It has a different approach to research and a different business model, with all staff having shares in the business. Truth has just won UK Best New Agency of the Year.

Andy will provide insights into how successful business advisers evolve. He will tell us about developing the mindset that allows us to interpret any form of evidence, qualitative or quantitative, in a succinct and actionable way that can be communicated to business leaders. As Andy points out:

'Business leaders famously take their decisions as much on instinct and
a compelling argument as they do on facts and figures. To make the transition to
trusted advisers, researchers have to embrace this, and are well placed but
often lack the confidence and business tool kit to do so.

The workshop seeks to discuss these opportunities and barriers in more detail, and will draw from your experiences as well as Andy’s to develop a framework for making the transition.

The workshops are staying at the bargain (early bird) price of $352 for AMSRS members / $440 for non-members. Click here to register now.

Quality of GDP?

I've never been to France, but having watched live Tour de France TV coverage in the middle of the night in the depths of a Canberra winter, it seems there's a certain appeal to the place. Aside from le Tour, there's the food, the Alps, the wine, the culture, a language which I think sounds beautiful no matter what you're saying, and the fact that the President can marry a supermodel (and vice-versa!)...

These are probably some of the reasons that French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested yesterday at the Sorbonne that getting rid of the 'cult of figures' and the 'cult of the market' (le culte des figures et le culte du marché - told you it sounded beautiful!) by incorporating measures of people's quality of life into a GDP-type index might be a good idea. The joie de vivre index, as The Independant terms it, was proposed by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and seized upon by Sarkozy. In essence, it would incorporate GDP but would also include other factors such as holiday length, quality of public services and other measures around general wellbeing.

At a guess, there's probably a little more to Sarkozy's proposal than just the seemingly wonderful French lifestyle. Luckily, Dr Paul Jelfs from the ABS will give us a rundown on this area of thought in his presentation 'Measuring progress: Global, national and local perspectives'.

I guess the question for me is how we incorporate those particularly Australian aspects of quality of life...

REALLY important communication

Most marketers and researchers will say that communication is important. Normally, they will say this is because it has the potential to affect the health of a brand or the awareness and behaviour around certain government initiatives, but rarely can they claim it’s a matter of life or death (unless they’re talking about a brand).

But there are some situations in which it truly is a matter of life or death. As an example, as reported here, Victorian Premier John Brumby has announced a new national fire warning system.

Now this is an area of communication where the messages must be heard and comprehended by as many people as possible, and lead to the right sorts of behaviours. Otherwise, lives could be lost. In other words, truly important communication.

So how do communicators choose their words in these situations? How do they avoid confusion? How do they avoid panic? How do they communicate with a diverse range of people?

David Bruce and Michelle Hendrie’s 2009 AMSRS Conference paper ‘Communicating during a crisis – Choosing your words’ provides an insight into the research behind the words, and methods of replicating the how people might respond to communication while a disaster is happening. And, in music to researchers’ ears, the research has contributed significantly to a guide to be distributed among emergency communicators, entitled Emergency Warnings: Choosing Your Words, which is now available here. The research report on wording in CALD and Indigenous communities is also available.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how the research contributed to this guide. The paper will be presented in the Government Communications session on Day 1.

6 minutes and 40 seconds

A few weeks ago around 100 punters crammed into the Occidental Hotel (Sydney) for the inaugural NSW AMSRS Pecha Kucha night.

This was a warm up event for the conference, as the impressive trio of Kelly Sutherland, Bill Guo and Andrew Paul prepare to represent the Blues (against stiff competition might I add) in Pecha Kucha State of Origin.

For those who missed the memo, Pecha Kucha is a rapid-fire presentation format: 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, 6:40 total to say your piece.

Sounds easy? Try it and find out.

The topic for Pecha Kucha at 100 Stories is 'my story in research' - the teasers at the Occidental confirm that the topic and format are bringing out some fascinating stories well told.

If the night was anything to go by, we're in for a treat at the conference. And a hoot to boot.

Is the TV broken?

TV doesn't work, and Marketers aren't doing what they want to do.

That is the key finding from a Naked Communications/Booz & Co study, reported here in The Australian (including input from invited 2009 AMSRS Conference speaker Adam Ferrier). (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25871847-7582,00.html).

The study involved interviews with a selection of marketers from here and overseas. The study found that marketers believe that 'old' forms of marketing such as blingy TV campaigns, naff slogans and the use of celebrities (to all of which they feel constrained) no longer work.

However, marketers don't know which of the new marketing techniques will work. This clearly leaves them in a bit of a pickle.

So, why is there a dearth of knowledge about which new methods will work? Does what marketers want match what works in the real world? Or what consumers want?

Call me biased, but this looks like a space into which research could fit rather nicely. Could we be doing anything different in our research techniques to incorporate these new methods of marketing?

Is this why, to quote the title of Adam's presentation, 'insight is not enough'?

I can't wait to find out the answers to these questions and more at the Conference!

I am, you are, we are…

pumped beyond belief to be hosting the inaugural Asia Pacific Research Conference (APRC).

The idea for the APRC came out of the 2009 ESOMAR Conference in China, as a way for the research community across the region to build professional connections and get the chance to see each other’s best papers.

The APRC is being put on by the AMSRS as well as the equivalent market research associations in China, Japan and Korea. Members of these organisations have been invited to attend, as well as those from other related member organisations in the region including New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

We’re lucky to be hosting it this year, as it will rotate around the region (a new country each year), and it will be some time before we welcome the APRC back to Australian shores.

Everyone at the conference is welcome to join the Asia Pac parallel stream on Wednesday afternoon, which includes award-winning papers from the recent conferences in China, Japan and Korea, as well as local talent revealing some tricks of the cross-cultural research trade.

We also have an eminent panel in the closing plenary session on Thursday, bringing us up-to-date, in-depth knowledge of the Asia Pacific market.

However, the whole conference will carry this theme. From Geraldine Doogue’s opening address (encourage us to re-consider Australia’s role in the Asia Pacific) to Anh Do’s moving story of arriving as a refugee in Australia from Vietnam on an 8m fishing boat – we’re no island, despite what the cartographers might like to tell us!

See the conference program for more details about this truly unique aspect to our conference (http://www.amsrs.com.au/files/Conference%2009/website/Conference09_Program_FINAL.pdf).

Networking (v) [nět'wûrk'ing]

Networking means different things to different people. Maybe for you it’s about how many business cards you give away, or collect. Or maybe it’s about talent scouting… or getting yourself head-hunted. Or perhaps (if you’re like me) it’s about having at least one seriously interesting conversation with someone you least expect.

Whatever your fancy, this conference is guaranteed to feather your networking tickle spot.

• strong registrations from commissioners of research (buyers/clients) as well as researchers
• a great ‘cabaret’ set up in the main room that makes it almost impossible not to meet your neighbours
• around 100 delegates from around the Asia Pacific Region (as part of the Asia Pacific Research Conference)
• a packed final session and cocktail drinks (Thursday night) with all the operations folks and young researchers
• networking games on Wednesday morning that will help break the ice for those of you who take a while to warm up
• a gala dinner on Wednesday night, complete with band, cabaret acts and casino tables (and no protracted B-lister speeches – guaranteed)
• informal social events, like the pre-conference golf on Tuesday (see earlier post).

Plus, right next door is one of Sydney’s finest pubs (the Art House), which has plenty of quiet corners for that sneaky mid-afternoon cocktail as you continue your lunchtime conversation in a more intimate setting. Call it business development – we won’t tell :)