Sasha Fontaine

Senior Cultural Strategist (New York)

Sasha came to insight work via a start at the Creative Artist Agency, cultivating her innate curiosity to ask ‘the why’ behind culture in pursuit of humanizing brands in sports, entertainment, and beyond. She’s experienced in creating strategy work grounded in insights and trends – also in running workshops and thought leadership, as she served as the co-editor-in-chief for CAA founder Dwayne Wade’s AMP trend reports, centered on today’s diverse youth. She joins Crowd DNA, as a senior consultant, excited to combine her sociology major and business background to bring insights to life. On the flip side, Sasha’s intersectional background spurs her passion as an avid traveller. Over the years she’s worked as an English teacher in Spain (any way to practice her Spanish) and a project leader for Save The Water. In her free time, you can catch her furthering her passion for sustainability, salsa dancing, yoga, or – whether on Long Island or a faraway beach – surfing.

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.