Commonwealth Business Council - Business Environment Survey 2007, UK Private Sector Views
Client challenge
The Commonwealth Business Council (CBC) works to mobilise private sector investment flows into developing countries by articulating the business view to Commonwealth governments on what works and what does not work. The biannual CBC Business Environment Survey (BES), carried out across 33 Commonwealth nations, is a key tool enabling constructive and structured dialogue with Commonwealth governments.
The CBC had a requirement for a professional and ethical organisation – with demonstrable research experience, extensive private sector networks and the credibility and acceptability to secure interviews with business leaders – to research and report on current private sectors views across business sectors in the UK. Article 13 was selected to carry out this work as a result of a tendering process.
What did we do?
Article 13 researched private sector views of the UK business environment using a combination of an online survey and telephone interviews.
The CBC’s standardised questionnaire was inputted into Article 13’s specialised stakeholder research software to create an interactive online version. Once the questionnaire was live online, a multi-phased communications strategy was adopted to encourage people in Article 13’s wide business networks to spare 20 minutes of their time, click on the link provided and submit their personal views electronically. More than 2,000 individuals were contacted at least twice by email, e-newsletter and/or telephone. Despite this targeted approach, however, the desired number of responses was not achieved and Article 13 provided the client with a series of concrete recommendations based on their own research expertise in order to ensure an improved response rate for the next BES. A report of online questionnaire responses was exported from the stakeholder research programme and provided to the CBC for inclusion in the BES 2007.
Article 13 supplemented responses received to the online questionnaire with 21 semi-structured telephone interviews with senior business leaders, each lasting for approximately 30 minutes. Interview candidates were selected in line with the sectors specified in the client’s initial brief. As well as varying by industry sector (e.g. manufacturing, financial services, service industries, utilities, etc), interview candidates came from businesses ranging in size from SMEs with turnovers less than £2 million through to large national companies and multinational corporations with turnovers worth many millions and often billions of pounds. Every care was taken to select a representative sample of interviewees, however, Article 13 was careful to inform the CBC that key themes, opinions and issues which were identified might not necessarily have been indicative of a broader selection of private sector views on the business environment. On completion of the interviews and drafting of the transcripts, interview responses were analysed and sorted by key themes and issues as well as numbers of responses for a particular viewpoint (where applicable) emerging for each question. Results of this analysis were presented to the client in report form.
Innovation PLUS
Article 13 was able to draw on its wide networks at senior level in the private sector and use established stakeholder research software to produce a comprehensive and informative body of research on private sector views in the UK for inclusion in the CBC’s Business Environment Survey 2007 to be launched at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Autumn 2007.
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