Edward Bird

Director, Cultural Strategy (Numbers, London)

Ed first developed his love of insight back at university, while studying geography and, specifically, the relationship between people and the environment. After graduation, the next natural step was to the world of insight agencies, where the relationship between people and brands became his primary concern. Starting his career at Arkenford and System1, Ed worked across a variety of qualitative and quantitative projects, ranging from large, strategic mixed method pieces, to the more tactical world of pack and ad testing. Leaving the laptop behind, Ed recently spent a season playing cricket in Australia, as well as six months travelling around Asia. But now he’s back and ensconced in our Crowd Numbers team, working on briefs for high ranking media, tech, alcohol and finance clients. When the numbers are all done, he can be found stretching his creative mind by designing board games and running his fledgling clothing company.

Narrated Galleries

We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words
Crowd Communities

We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform
Pinterest

We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.
Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.
Network Audits

If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.