Senior research capacity for agencies and organisations.

I plan and run research projects from first design to final delivery. With experience spanning every stage of the research cycle, I am available for individual services or for full programme management.

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Portrait photograph of Jonathan Mulligan, Research Consultant
Services

The work I do

Agency Associate

Senior research capacity for agencies that need an experienced pair of hands on complex projects.

I work with research and insight consultancies as an embedded senior associate - project by project, or on a retained basis. I run projects end to end: from briefing and design through fieldwork, analysis, and client presentation. I present at C-suite level, contribute to proposals and RFP responses, and work in client conversations where research credibility matters. My background spans project management, fieldwork operations, analysis, and commercial delivery - including managing a 55-seat, 24/7 global B2B CATI operation conducting research in over 15 languages for clients including HSBC and Shell.

Discrete services
I run key driver analysis, regression modelling, time series forecasting, cluster analysis and segmentation, and complex sampling and weighting. My MSc in Social Research Methods and Statistics from the University of Manchester gives me a rigorous grounding in this work, and I apply these techniques across social research, housing, professional services, and regulated sectors.

I work across a wide range of data sources: client satisfaction surveys, large-scale household studies, employee trackers, B2B programmes, and longitudinal research. I work in SPSS, Q, R, DisplayR, and Excel and deliver in the format that suits you: tables, report, or presentation.
I understand how question design affects data quality and how to structure a questionnaire so that the analysis is straightforward at the other end. I design questionnaires from scratch or review and improve existing ones - telephone, self-completion, or online. I write questionnaires for housing satisfaction programmes, B2B client experience trackers, national business surveys, and employee research. I script in any major platform: Qualtrics, Askia, Snap Surveys, SurveyMonkey, and others.
I moderate in-depth interviews for research agencies and end clients across a full range of audiences: consumer, professional, resident, and senior stakeholder - including General Counsels, C-suite executives, utility sector stakeholders, and professional body members. I work to your brief or develop the guide from scratch.
I facilitate online and in-person focus groups for research agencies and direct clients. I run groups across consumer, professional, housing, and employee audiences. I work to your discussion guide or help shape one from scratch.
I produce data processing specifications, cleaned datasets, and cross-tabulation banners to agency specification. I work in multiple formats and systems (e.g. SPSS, Q, R, DisplayR, and Excel) according to your requirements.
I take your processed data and tables and turn them into a findings document: structured, clearly written, and ready for whoever needs to act on it. Report, executive summary, or presentation deck. The meaning stays with you.
Programmes

The full project, from design to delivery

Some projects need someone to own the whole thing: briefing, design, fieldwork, analysis, reporting, and presentation. I run full programmes across client experience, resident experience, member experience, and employee research.

Client Experience
Research that tells professional services firms what their clients actually think.
I design and deliver client experience programmes for law firms, accountancies, and consultancies. I moderate senior interviews with General Counsels and C-suite decision-makers, and have led programmes for Bird & Bird and Clarke Willmott and contributed to projects for Womble Bond Dickinson and DAC Beachcroft. I work across the full methodological range: depth interviews, surveys, and ongoing feedback infrastructure. I present findings directly to leadership and boards.
Resident Experience
Resident research for housing associations, from someone who led it from inside one.
I design and deliver the full range: telephone surveys, SMS feedback systems, large-scale household surveys with complex sampling and weighting, and qualitative depth work. I delivered Strategic Housing Market Assessments at significant scale - 153,000 households across North Yorkshire. I spent eight years at Moat Homes leading all resident and customer research for a housing association managing 20,000 homes. I understand the regulatory context from the inside: I contributed to the development of Tenant Satisfaction Measures working directly with the sector regulator.
Member Experience
Member research for professional bodies and associations with expert, methodologically literate audiences.
I design and deliver member experience research for professional bodies, trade associations, and membership organisations. I designed and implemented a digital community platform for the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries enabling structured research with a global membership across multiple time zones. I understand the specific challenge of researching expert audiences who have strong views about methodology.
Employee Experience
Culture and employee research for organisations that need to understand what it is like to work for them.
I design and run employee and culture research programmes: surveys, depth interviews, and focus groups. At Moat Homes I led employee research and culture studies as part of the in-house insight function. At Meridian West I delivered culture research for The Biodiversity Consultancy, a specialist environment consultancy.
Selected Work

Three projects worth knowing about

01
Building a Strategic Insight Function
When I joined Moat Homes, the insight team was known internally as the spreadsheet police - reactive, marginal, and easy to ignore. I built a cross-functional governance structure, established a business partner model, and ensured findings reached the board every quarter. By the time I left, demand for the team's work had grown beyond its capacity. Documented outcomes included measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and direct contributions to Moat's Retirement Living Strategy.
02
Client Listening Platform for a Major Law Firm
Bird & Bird wanted a structured client listening programme, but the real challenge was architectural: how do you bring together online surveys, ad hoc feedback, historical data, and interview transcripts from internal interviewers into a single coherent picture? I designed and built a multi-source programme feeding a unified Qualtrics reporting dashboard, giving the firm's leadership self-serve access to client experience data across all input types in one place. The value was in the design: making something genuinely usable out of data that had previously been fragmented.
03
Digital Research Platform for the IFoA
The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries needed to engage a global membership in structured qualitative research across multiple time zones: something a conventional survey or interview programme could not have achieved. I designed and implemented a digital community platform that enabled members to contribute on their own schedules, in their own time zones, generating comparable insight across regions. It opened up a research approach that simply had not been available to them before.

Available now for new project work.

If you are looking for senior research capacity across the full lifecycle, or a specific piece of work done properly, I would be glad to hear from you.

Get in touch