Intro
You, your internal strategy/research/insights team, and one or more vendors have just wrapped up a project to support a drug, medical device, or portfolio of products at a critical point.
A magnificent 200-slide deck with 100s of hours of research has been created, emailed to a mailing list, and potentially presented to your internal colleagues in an hour-long call.
A few weeks later, it’s forgotten except for a few takeaways by individuals across the organization, hidden away in people’s emails or, at best, in a hard-to-access SharePoint folder.
Sound familiar?
What if the findings were brought to life more engagingly?
What if they lived beyond the project in the future?
What if people in the broader organization had access and could easily find and use parts that were of value to them?
We can achieve that by gently challenging how information is conventionally shared in organizations. To do this, we must consider cultural shifts in how people view media and obtain information in their personal lives.
In this article, I’ll cover principles to guide designing any deliverable, and then cover 5 formats that could be of use when your team shares findings from a strategy, CI, or MR project in your organization. For the formats, I’ll talk about the Microsoft Office tools that can be used to create these for convenience, but the advice is agnostic of software, and there are many suitable (and some free) alternatives.
(re)introducing user experience design
It makes sense that when you are given a set of business questions from a brand team or senior leadership, there is a big focus on finding the unknowns, creating hypotheses, and searching for answers. The challenge is balancing the research phase, where you’re addressing these, with the reporting, where you’re relaying findings.
Conventionally, on the vendor side, the reporting phase is thought of as a few days of work at the end of the research to quickly assemble a PowerPoint report. Over the years, one of the biggest changes I have made with my approach to projects is thinking (and asking clients) about how the findings will be used, by whom, what formats they like, and when and how they want to see it, right from the start of the research. Whether you’re in-house in a pharma or med tech or a vendor supporting, these questions are essential to periodically review throughout the project as circumstances may change. With this adjustment it effectively means that the reporting phase now lasts for longer than the research.
Following a few discussions with former colleagues and clients on the topic of making findings more engaging and useful, I looked into other knowledge domains and came across the discipline of User Experience Design. You might have come across this when talking about consumer products or applications, but the principles can be equally useful when thinking about project reporting.
I looked at multiple sources and came across between 5 to 16 “Key” user experience design principles. I picked out 7 I thought most relevant and will give a short explainer for each (If you’re interested in learning more there are plenty of good resources online):
- User-centricity – The name is in the title, with this one being the most critical. Periodically throughout the research, analysis, and reporting, remind yourself who the work is for and how they will want to access and use it, and then make decisions to ensure it is easy for them. If your aim is to get your function’s work read and used more widely across your organization, in parallel, think about who else in the organization may find the project useful and what you can do to aid them in making the reporting usable. The reasoning behind each of the formats later in the article is underpinned by this principle.
- Consistency – As your team begins to deliver work in different formats internally, consistency across deliverables is important. Although you will likely spend time testing new formats, tweaking and altering to find what works, you should aim to make aspects similar across the same formats and, ideally, across all deliverables.
- Hierarchy – ordering findings so the most crucial information sits summarised at the top is a standard of consulting PowerPoint reports ever since Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle was shared widely. The same should be maintained in any other format. Ideally, you’ll signpost to more important sections for individual functions or users at the highest level of SharePoint or at the top/start of the formats we’ll discuss below.
- Context – making it clear why the work was done and who it was initially created for is critical, and why I always recommend a cover slide is included at the start of a deck or Excel file to explain who it was created by and for, when, and for what reason. This means that if someone who wasn’t involved in the original project comes across it a few years later, they can open the file, understand its purpose, and be able to use it for their current work. The same is true for any formats we’ll consider below.
- Visual Appeal – We must balance presenting information and the information being presented attractively. Many of us have sat through slide presentations with dense pages of size 10 font that may contain useful findings but are so visually unappealing we lose interest. There has to be intention and effort to lay out different visual deliverables (including emails and text). One solution is to work with an internal design team in your organization (if one exists) or you can commission a vendor/freelance to help set up initial templates that can be easy to update and incorporate new information.
- Usability – If you’re creating new formats to share information, ensuring it is easy to open, play, read, or review is critical. It may be worth checking with your organization’s IT team if everyone in the business will be able to open a certain file type, and don’t forget to check both mobile and PC as many of your colleagues will likely read/view deliverables on their phone.
- Accessibility – Ensuring those with visual or audio impairment can access your deliverables should also be considered. Your company color branding will likely have undergone visual checks, but for the video/audio formats below, you’ll want to consider if anything needs to be done to ensure accessibility.
Now that we have introduced the user experience design principles; we’ll look at ideas for different formats to deliver findings and how these principles should be applied to ensure maximum engagement and use of findings.
Rethinking how you deliver project findings
The way people engage with media and information in their personal lives has changed drastically over the last 20 years. Yet, the way information is shared in companies has remained essentially unchanged over that time frame, with emails containing dense PowerPoint decks or 60-minute+ presentations going slide by slide still common. If these are the only ways your team shares project findings, it may be causing a lack of engagement with your hard work.
So, taking this into account, we’ll explore several “novel” formats. Some of these have become popular in modern life and can address issues with conventional ways of sharing information in business. Others are simple but cater to the fact that we are bombarded by so much information in our daily lives; chunking findings down makes them more likely to be read.
We’ll also cover which user design principles you need to account for in each format and give an example or idea of implementing it within a pharma or med-tech company to share the findings from a strategy, competitive intelligence, or market research project.
1. Break a long report down into more digestible chunks
Many people are overwhelmed when they open up a report that has 100+ slides. “Do I want to read this?” or “How easy is it to find the information I need?” will be common thoughts in the minds of your average colleague who opens a new report.
Now contrast this with how many of us read about topics today. Often its short articles online, whether sports, news, lifestyle or history, that will likely include a “5-minute read” label at the start, which helps people decide whether to continue or stop, or be of a consistent format that we know the length of when starting.
There will likely also be multiple pages on a similar topic, with different aspects being broken out with headings to engage readers (and keep them on the website for longer). As an example, think about a sports news website and a football (soccer) match, there may be one article about the result of a match, one about the coach’s reaction in an interview, one about the referee’s decisions, and one piece of analysis by an ex-player. Readers can sit and read all of them, or just the ones they are interested in.
So, by learning from digital media, we can make certain deliverables easier for individuals in the organization to access and digest, and make them more likely to read it. by breaking them down into shorter reports and labeling their length on the file.
Applying the user design principles, starting with user-centricity, you can split out and title sections that may interest specific functions. Each mini deck should still have a cover slide explaining who it is for and the context, with a link to the master deck.
For usability in the file title, you can give an estimated reading time/number of slides per deck. Ideally, all of the decks are stored in the same SharePoint folder, where you can add a coversheet as a table of contents, capturing all of the information above to create a hierarchical overview. This way, future users can access everything easily, and new team members from specific functions can use them for onboarding.
This is a simple way to make findings more digestible and allows you to think about other functions in the organization that you may not commonly see or use your reports that may have very specific interests that a few slides from a more extensive project may address.
2. Homework questions to engage your audience
Most of us remember from our days studying at university or school that just reading textbooks or notes is not the best way to retain and use information. You’ll have developed your own active ways of retaining what you cover, but it’s likely you would have used mock /practice questions at some point to test applying the knowledge.
In the corporate/consulting space, one of the reasons, we like to run a workshop at the end of a project is to convene team members and leadership to discuss what the findings mean and, more importantly, what the organization now does with them.
However, getting everyone together is often challenging due to calendars, priorities, and time restraints, even virtually, so we need an alternative. One proxy for a workshop based on the academic example is to share a series of probing questions for people alongside the report as “homework” (do give them the disclaimer that they don’t need to submit their answers).
Exploring a few of the user design principles will aid in understanding how useful this can be for an organization. Thinking about consistency, you can use an initial set of standard questions that are sent with every deliverable;
- What do you think about these findings? Are they new, or is there information that you only partially knew beforehand, but now you have stronger evidence or different perspectives?
- Who should you speak with about these findings within or outside the organization(e.g., supply or partners)?
- What topics do you need to discuss with them, and is there anything you need to change?
You can also build the project context into the questions, to help engage and remind the users of its purpose. For example, “Given this research was commissioned to understand our newest competitor and their planned activities, how will you adjust your marketing tactics?”.
In terms of visual appeal, you could create a simple template table with the questions and a space for the recipient to fill out, that is included in the email cover letter. Or, on PowerPoint, you can write questions for specific slides in the slide notes, then “print” as a PDF with the print layout set to Notes Page, which will create a version of the report with the slide at the top and the questions beneath.
Depending on who commissioned the project and for what purpose, you should ideally include their input on the questions, or better yet, have them send the questions and deliverables to their team to increase engagement.
All together, sharing a set of questions is one of the most straightforward and time-efficient ways of getting increased engagement with the research and ensuring it can be used beyond the initial project.
3. Infographics
A picture paints a 1000 words. Infographics are even better as they have words and pictures. From sports stats, health campaigns, and environmental information to their use in school textbooks, infographics are commonplace across media formats in modern-day life. Now most corporate quarterly and year-end reports contain them. Yet they’re not commonly used to share findings internally at the business unit or brand level.
One of the challenges with a conventional PowerPoint report is the “limited” space on a single slide. Getting the sweet spot between too much and too little information on a slide is a challenge. in contrast, an infographic can be used to convey 4 to 5 slides’ worth of information in the same place, linking together complex topics with supporting data and recommendations.
As a first step, due to the time and effort required to create a good infographic, it is worth sharing an idea of what you intend and checking beforehand with whoever has commissioned the project to see if this would be useful.
Then, focusing on the visual appeal is critical, and depending on the design skills within your team, you may want to commission support. Thankfully, many talented freelancers on platforms like Fiverr / Upwork can create infographics, or you could request it as part of the project deliverables from a vendor/consultancy with their own design team.
In terms of the content, a good start would be to take each of the 5-6 summary bullet points or recommendations from the executive summary slide and add a simple graph, numbers, statistics, or a limited amount of text to back up the point, creating a larger image that a user can scroll on their mobile or PC.
Or you may want to capture the key findings across an individual section of the report, similarly taking several of the most essential slides worth of information and incorporating them in the same place. For this sort of infographic, as much effort is needed to work out what to remove as to what to include to ensure it doesn’t become overwhelming.
Accessibility is an important point to keep in mind for an infographic, making sure the image has good visual readability. From a usability point of view, hosting the infographic on an internal company, portfolio, or brand SharePoint news or key internal documents page will make it more prominent and likely to be viewed.
An example project where this would be useful is for a company launching a product into a new market where the buying/reimbursement process is complex with multiple stages and stakeholders. Taking a larger canvas to draw out a timeline from first contact to completion of the sale, including stakeholder needs and behaviors captured from primary and secondary research, will be useful for the team to decide what needs to be done at each stage.
This format is likely not suitable or needed for all projects, but in certain circumstances, it could be a valuable way to share findings and may even warrant printing and sticking on the wall of a brand team or leader’s office if done well enough.
4. Reels / Short form video
I’d be surprised if any of the readers don’t watch short-form video content at least once a week on one of the many social media platforms that now offer it (including LinkedIn). Although funny cat and dog videos seem to take up a large amount of those created, there are 1000s of creators sharing short-form educational content on a vast range of subjects in the public domain.
Adopting this format for project findings addresses some of the challenges and drawbacks of the traditional 30-60 minute slide show presentation: ensuring your audience is available when you schedule it, keeping your audience engaged when they watch it, and ensuring that relevant sections are easily accessible for people with specific interests.
In terms of creating short-form video, look to take a series of 60-second clips, recording with Microsoft Teams or one of its add-ons (like Loom), talking through the key points from individual slides from a project. These can be stored in a SharePoint Page or Teams space that the broader business can access.
By using a consistent approach to break down a longer report, people will become familiar with your deliverables and can easily review different projects to see critical findings. An example structure for the videos would include 1 for the project context, 1 or more for the methodology, 1 for each key point/recommendation on the executive summary, and then as many individual section summaries or single data slides that could be useful to individuals. In terms of naming, a similar format could be used, as discussed in the Break it Down section, to include who it could benefit.
Within the larger SharePoint space, you can set up a subfolder for each project, where a series of videos can be easily navigated, increasing usability, which is especially helpful for people to come back to impactful projects when working on strategy or tactics at a later date. This format also forces the presenter to be succinct, avoiding verbal tics (no more um-ing and ar-ing), with the need to smoothly present the findings. The slide can be shown, and animations can be used to bring in different elements to help with the visual appeal of the format.
Of all the formats, this is probably the most “novel” for the average pharma or med-tech company to share consulting project findings, but it is both simple and can be engaging and easy for users to come back and watch the most critical information being explained.
5. Podcasts
Podcasts have become a popular media format in everyday life, with various sources estimating that between 3-4 million are now available. They’re a familiar and well-established way of sharing information that has moved counter to many of the shorter formats that have become more popular over the last 20 years.
Weirdly, though, they are not as commonly used in organizations as they could be and have seemed somewhat unorthodox on several occasions when I suggested them as a way of sharing research findings with former clients.
So, what are some ideas to create an excellent internal podcast? In terms of format and length, one of the advantages of a podcast versus a traditional presentation is breaking it into more convenient sections that your colleagues can access.
You can either create a “longer” episode where you timestamp chapters that the audience can skip to or create several shorter episodes that can be listened to during a commute or coffee break.
Another benefit of a podcast is being able to comprehensively but quickly explain both the context and hierarchy at the start, pointing the audience to the full report and to time-stamped podcast sections that certain users may find more interesting.
Accessibility is another aspect to consider, and whoever is recording the podcast must ensure that good microphones are used. Also, providing a transcript, which can be generated on a Microsoft Teams call if you use it to record, is helpful for anyone with hearing challenges or if it is being shared with non-native English-speaking colleagues.
A single presenter may be ok for a snappy 5-10 minute key findings episode, but for a more extended session, I would consider having two people discuss the findings, to keep it more interesting. You can also record as a podcast video, screen sharing the slides as you discuss, or share the slides alongside the recording and reference the number or title as you work through them.
This is a format I have personally used multiple times with clients and have gotten positive feedback on. Several times, we have used it ahead of a competitor workshop, where we pretended to be the executive team of the competitors giving a briefing to the colleagues who would simulate the competitor during the live workshop. As well as sharing the competitors’ information we had gathered in the research phase, we also primed them for the workshop and got them excited about the roles they would play.
Overall, podcasts can be a great way to get your team’s findings shared more widely within your organization, increasing knowledge of competitors, market conditions, or payer/regulatory updates that impact your business.
Wrap up
These ideas are by no means exhaustive on how you can translate your project findings into more engaging and helpful formats, and some other options or combinations of those above can be used to build increased engagement and result in longer-term use.
Being willing to experiment with the different formats and then collect feedback or capture engagement metrics are all really useful. You could also survey colleagues (either verbally or through Microsoft forms) after the first few versions of a new format and check if it is working.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas in more specific circumstances or have your novel way of delivering findings not covered, we would love to hear from you at sv@sivan-consulting.com, on our LinkedIn page, or by booking a call here.