Stratagem/Savanta ComRes MLA Research Panel

Is your organisation really contributing to change? Are your messages understood? How do you compare with your competitors? With the Assembly and Executive continuing to progress legislation at pace, balance the COVID-19 response and impacts of EU exit, not to mention an Assembly election just around the corner, MLAs are, and will remain, key opinion formers and influencers, so what they think about you or your issue matters.

Stratagem’s MLA Research Panel enables you to measure your impact, demonstrate effectiveness, and help gauge how your organisation and issues are perceived, all of which can provide you with valuable insight to support your public affairs activity, influence party manifestos and test policy ideas ahead of the next Assembly mandate.

The research is conducted bi-annually each spring and autumn in partnership with Savanta ComRes, a specialist London-based polling and research organisation.

Since launching the Panel, we have worked with over 70 organisations across the health, education, business, housing and community and voluntary sectors, many of whom are repeat customers, as well as a number of regulatory and non-departmental public bodies. What do they all have in common? They want to understand what impact they are making by evaluating their public affairs work. They place impact and measurement at the heart of their influencing activities.

Our insights enable you to: 

• Benchmark reputation
• Assess political perception of emerging ideas, policies and campaigns
• Test whether ideas are effectively reaching the corridors of Stormont
• Analyse how strongly individual political parties are engaging with you
• Inform strategy and planning

How does it work?

Once you have secured your questions, the fieldwork is completed within four to six weeks with a panel of at least 33 MLAs (amounting to over 40 percent of MLAs with Executive ministers excluded) completing either online or hardcopy surveys.

Organisations who submit questions to the Panel are not disclosed to MLAs, likewise the responses of individual MLAs are not disclosed. Our experience shows that the anonymity of self-competition surveys encourages parliamentarians to give their candid opinions on a policy issue or of an organisation.

We provide you with a report interpreting the responses, complete with graphs and broken down by community designation, political party, region, date of birth, gender and length of service in the Assembly.

We can also present the findings to your Board or Senior Management, as well as make recommendations in support of your public affairs strategy.

To speak with one of our consultants or to find out how the Panel can support your public affairs strategy, contact matthew.jackson@stratagem-ni.com