Vanessa Chan, Senior Research Executive

I joined Ipsos MORI in 2008 after graduating with a degree in Politics (MA Hons) from the University of Edinburgh.

My main area of interest is designing robust approaches to gather feedback from service users to inform service provision and related communications.

This has involved utilising a range of techniques including:

• managing large-scale face-to-face surveys to track satisfaction with service provision over time
• using qualitative techniques to explore views and experiences of services in detail, and observing how people access services
• triangulating evidence from service users, those who provide services and relevant administrative/cost data to provide in-depth service evaluation.

I also have a particular interest in working with private sector clients to help them understand their corporate reputation among key audiences. I co-manage our annual survey of Members of the Scottish Parliament and played a key role in the set-up and running of our survey of chief executives and finance directors in Scottish local authorities. My main roles on these projects is ensuring that fieldwork runs effectively to ensure a high response rate and providing clients with actionable recommendations on how they can improve their engagement strategies.

My experience of working with both public and private sector clients means that I can effectively communicate research findings and provide actionable recommendations at a strategic level. My experience in this regard includes writing reports for publication by Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Government, and presenting research findings to senior managers in BP and Microsoft.

Beyond my immediate project work, I am a regular contributor to Ipsos MORI Scotland’s Approach newsletter which aims to provide insight into how research can best be used to solve the current challenges facing research buyers.