Award-winning research
James Deane blogs about the work of the award-winning BBC Media Action Research and Learning Team.
It was a proud moment for our research team when BBC Media Action was awarded the President’s Medal at the annual Market Research Society Awards this week. The medal is given to an individual or organisation that has made “an extraordinary contribution to research”. The society paid special tribute to the rigour of BBC Media Action’s research and to its innovative Climate Asia research portal.
These awards, the largest of their kind in Europe, are highly prestigious. I accepted the medal from the Market Research Society President, Dianne Thompson on behalf of the BBC Media Action and our Research and Learning team of up to 100 specialists conducting research, evaluation and insight activity in 37 countries across 42 languages in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
But why did we win? A mixture of reasons really.
Not many organisations can claim to have surveyed populations on the scale and in the environments that we do. We’ve conducted research in places from rural Somaliland to the snow-capped mountains of Nepal, and in one year alone we engaged more than 60,000 people worldwide through our research activities. This activity is critical to contributing to our understanding of how our programmes are having an impact on people’s attitudes, knowledge and behaviour. We don’t just research the reach of our projects and programmes but we measure the impact our activities have on improving people’s lives.
Evidence matters
But above all perhaps, we are increasingly committed to generating evidence about what works and what doesn’t when working with media to achieve development outcomes. The slogan for this year’s MRS awards was “Because Evidence Matters”. It does and we are determined to continue to ensure an evidence-based approach lies at the heart of our efforts to work with media to improve people’s lives.
Understanding of the complex needs of our audiences, many of whom are marginalised, lacking a voice or living in poverty is absolutely critical. Research informs our work before we begin a project, as we progress through it and it helps us to measure its success. It is wonderful to have this recognised by other research professionals.
BBC Media Action produces a range of research publications. Our most recent research working paper explores the impact of media in people’s lives in post-revolutionary Libya and Tunisia.
