Small Budget, Big Impact

Learn how the NSPCC maximised the impact of their “Look, Say, Sing, Play” programme on a limited budget. This webinar offers practical advice on creative participant engagement and securing internal buy-in.

The NSPCC runs an important service with new parents of babies and toddlers up to two years called Look, Say, Sing, Play. The objective of this is to help parents build bonds with their babies through positive interactions that help to prevent later issues. This takes the form of face-to-face workshops at our service centres as well as an online hub and email journey.

In 2021 the charity noticed that around 90% of the parents signing up were mums and it was really important to NSPCC to understand why dads weren’t engaging. Given a budget of around £2,000, the research team were originally asked to run a survey to find out why. The charity quickly realised that it couldn’t do anything sufficiently meaningful with this amount of money using an external agency, so instead it paid a recruitment agency, enlisted the help of the one male trained moderator in the NSPCC and ran a series of focus groups, interviews and workshops. It also used its creative team to mock up new marketing and training materials based on initial findings and then taking them back to the dads for feedback. Three years later the NSPCC has overhauled its comms for LSSP and launched a whole new service stream “Look Say Sing Play for Dads” based on this original tiny research budget.

What you’ll learn:

• How a small budget doesn’t mean small research
• Questioning a brief and building on it for better results
• Thinking creatively to make the most of what you’ve got
• How to get buy in across the organisation to get maximum impact from your research

Rachel Congdon

Rachel Congdon has led the Research & Consumer Insight team at the NSPCC for the past 5 years. Rachel's work has included everything from delivering a new audience segmentation, overhauling brand trackers and using research to deliver a new brand strategy. Previously xx ran a research consultancy, including a stint at the charity WaterAid. I set up a new Strategic Insight team at Time Warner Magazines to harness the power of consumer trends in business development and started my career in Media agencies, including six years at Mediacom where I managed accounts spanning from Direct Line Insurance to Bonne Maman jams.