Nesta is the leading innovation charity in the UK, acting as a lodestar for innovation across a broad range of sectors.
The organisation works to guide and inform decisions about innovation, ensuring that it is conceived, designed, and executed in a way that will best serve all of society.
The Challenge
In order to build an understanding and connection with its largest stakeholder audience – the public – the organisation needed a framework from which it could tailor its messaging to maximise its impact.
Our approach
A nationally representative online survey of 4,121 UK adults was conducted on behalf of Nesta.
The survey sought to understand how the public perceived innovation across a number of practice areas, understanding where public support was highest for innovation to take place.
A key objective of the research was to identify which segments of the UK population are most open to innovation and technology, and which segments hold reservations about the value of innovation – and potentially its relevance and value to them as individuals.
This segmentation also enabled us to identify which messages would be most effective at engaging specific audiences, and talking to them about the aspects of innovation they felt were interesting and relevant to them.
The outcome
Nesta used the in-depth insight provided to tailor its communications promoting technology and innovation in order to maximise the impact of their messages.
Additionally, a tool was developed for the Nesta website so that people could complete a few simple questions and find out which segment they fell into – offering an interactive way for the general public to engage with Nesta’s work, and serving as a prompt for thinking about the way in which they and the rest of the UK think about innovation.