MRS Awards 2022

Its awards season and we are thrilled to be finalist for the Market Research Society (MRS) Public Policy / Social Research award for our work on Trussell Trust, and offer a HUGE congratulations to the wonderful Joanne Oguntimehin to have been nominated young researcher of the year. ... find out more here.

PUBLIC POLICY / SOCIAL RESEARCH Finalist

Through the second half of 2021 we worked with the Trussell Trust, an advisory board, and 48 participants to understand the experience of government debt and collaboratively develop policy solutions for a safer and fairer approach to debt collection. With participatory research principles at its heart, we devised a 3-phase deliberative approach that took place over the course of 5 months to understand the granular detail of people’s experience, identify areas where the repayments system could be improved, and get to a powerful set of recommendations covering three key areas of ‘debt prevention’, ‘harm reduction’, and ‘getting out of debt’. Alongside these, a full report of findings was published on the Trussell Trust website and presented at an All Party Parliamentary Group alongside participants from the research. We also developed a participatory toolkit for continued use by the Trussell Trust team and others in the sector who would like to conduct this type of research in the future. 

YOUNG RESEARCHER OF THE YEAR Joanne Oguntimehin

Joanne has been shortlisted for the MRS Young Researcher of the Year award. After 3 years in market research, she continues to bring learnings from her past as an English teacher into the profession and is committed to spreading the word about the industry to young people via the Speakers for Schools programme. This commitment to opening the doors of research continues via her involvement in the internship team at Humankind Research, recently leading the company’s involvement in the 10,000 Black Interns programme. 

Within her research work, Joanne is committed to creating safe and comfortable spaces for people, whether that be 16-year-old Londoners who have struggled in the education system or someone living with breast cancer. She also played a key part in developing the agency’s participatory research toolkit, following our work for Trussell Trust focussed on experiences of government debt.