At Lexicon Strategies, a major component of most of our engagements involves developing and conducting structured listening sessions. Authentic qualitative research is so important to successful community and social impact work and, we believe, it’s what makes the solutions we deliver so much more effective.

When we think about solutions or messaging, many people look to surveys or quantitative data. And, it’s always a mistake not to pair data with words. We live in a world driven by language and emotion, not numbers and percentages. The only way to capture actionable, successful insight is to listen to the people involved speaking directly to you.

Surveys and evaluations have become part of our everyday work life. But do we think critically enough about them?

Academic researchers rely on surveys and are constantly refining the science of surveying. It's worth taking a moment to read some of the academic literature as a check for best practices.

We are about to get down to the wire in this election season and polls are going to come in almost daily. There will be bar charts and pie charts and histograms and infographics. Commentators will share these visual works of art and draw pointed, definitive, passionate conclusions about us, and you and me and our country, our county, our zip code. In America in 2020, we have the data science DOWN and we can DEFINITELY make an infographic.

The thing is, many politicians, brands and marketers often confuse surveys and polls with actually listening to constituents and customers and understanding them. In fact, I believe that data can actually CONFUSE the understanding of a particular concept because we uncouple data from human language and human emotion.