Insights Curation: How Do You Do It?

I’ve recently been tasked with curating insights from over 15 organisations, covering qual and quant primary research, social listening, internal analytics and stakeholder input.

Back in the day, working in insight meant running research or analytics projects.

These days, a key driver of success might well be the ability to curate insights on a given topic from multiple sources.

As I think of it, insights curation = knowledgeably and purposefully selecting instrumental information from a range of sources, then arranging it into a digestible narrative or composition.

It’s not an easy thing to do well. But missing out important lessons because they come from a less familiar source isn’t a credible position for many insight managers to hold anymore. We need to not only synthesise available knowledge, but actively curate from a broader insight ecosystem.

But how can insight managers avoid getting bogged down, spending too much time on finding the story rather than telling it? And what’s the agency’s role in all this?

The pre-requisite for curation is a reasonable familiarity with (and access to) sources, each of which can take on more or less importance depending on the topic. Arguably we should be dedicating time to expanding our awareness of insight sources on an ongoing basis. The onus here falls on the client-side insight manager somewhat, but agencies have a role to play in sharing their arts not purely as a means to sell a product, but to further the truth alongside other practices.

I’ve often found there’s a ‘backbone’ insight source with the potential to provide at least 50% of the answer. For the rest, key to efficiency is focusing the analysis around a small handful of questions, and looking for corroboration and contradiction as well as builds and illustrations. You don’t need to be poring over the detail of every available input. The questions act as a mental filter and enable skim review.

A second level of triage is ‘big picture’ vs. tactical insights - the curation focus can be anywhere along the spectrum but of course needs to align with the actions you intend to influence. (Not completely clear what those are? Talk to your stakeholders before you start!)

The aim is not to end up with an insights compendium, but to craft a careful account of an issue. It may be tempting to showcase the full range of inputs but it’s worth keeping in mind your audience may have limited time or care for this.

But back to something I mentioned earlier - good curation isn’t easy to do. As an industry, do we offer sufficient support to learners of the craft? It’s important for team leaders to spotlight what they think ‘good’ curation looks like, to encourage and to incentivise it. Perhaps more cross-disciplinary story-telling training is needed, and perhaps also an injection of courage: when we curate insights, we ultimately take more responsibility for the message we leave behind and impart something of our personal style.