Olivia Penhallow

Project Producer (London)

Culture has a particular resonance for Olivia as she grew up between two of them. This sparked an early interest for exploring and traveling – but always ends up being drawn back to her old stomping ground of south east London. She attended a performing arts college, then went on to study a dual honours degree in drama and French at Royal Holloway University. During this time, she spent a year studying in Paris at La Sorbonne, which she eventually loved after taking a little time to become accustomed to the ‘la vie Parisienne’. More recently, she’s worked at C Space, providing project management for accounts such as Honda, L’Oreal, Siemens, Just Eat, and Google Human Truths. For the latter, it was a project on the new and evolving world of the metaverse which she found particularly interesting – and relevant to the way society is evolving post-pandemic. She enjoys exercising the practical and pragmatic side of her character, which drew her to the operations team at Crowd DNA. In her spare time, she gets involved with anything acting/performance-related.

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.