Ethnography. You may never have heard of it, but if you’re tempted to go beyond surveys and focus groups, it might be just what you need.

Defining what makes a university distinct from others can be quite tricky. There’s not a lot of reputational space in which to play - so if we’re starting to think we’re the same as everyone else, how do we really make our university feel different?

‘What influenced your decision to study at your chosen university?’

Ask a bunch of students and you’ll hear them recount personal stories about why they chose to study at their university: it was the interesting course content, the reputation of the university, or the good feeling they got at the Open Day.

University marketing teams often conduct focus groups and surveys as we seek to understand what drives students’ decision making. We use these insights to inform the content and campaigns we create. So far, so normal.

But research suggests these decision-making stories may be just that, stories. Our judgments can be influenced by a messy set of factors beyond our conscious awareness.

Thursday May 11th was REF Day, the day on which UK universities found out how their research had been rated by independent assessment panels.

The Research Excellence Framework gets a decidedly mixed response from the higher education community, but there’s no denying that a lot of hard work has gone in to the submissions from every university, and it’s worth celebrating those efforts.

Find out why you should be focussing your efforts on a smaller audience.

In this blog post, I share five strategic considerations for your Canadian enrollment strategy based on key aggregate findings from the Academica University/College Applicant Survey (UCAS).

We’ve reached that time of year when we start to receive a flurry of project requests aligned to end of financial year spend. In this post we explore your options and offer advice on making the most of this time and those remaining pockets of budget.

It’s very easy to assume that when we’re exploring our analytics and asking our audience whether they find our content useful that we’re doing audience research. But we’re barely scratching the surface.

Is your website really supporting future students make the choices that get them to achieve their dreams, or are we making it hard work for them? Robert Perry takes a look at the case and the need for creating powerful subject level pages.

Cloze tests help you check the suitability of language and messaging for certain audiences. We share how to set up and assess the results of cloze tests.

Diary studies are a great research method to gather real-time, self-reported experiences across time. Here’s how to plan and design your diary study to uncover what you need to know.

There was a lot of A-level and university application discourse on Twitter as results were released. Our Head of Research decided to map out the interactions and influence online to find out what was going on in these conversations.

How did A-level students react to results day? Our Research Analyst carried out social listening on results day to see how students were thinking and feeling about their grades – and, importantly, their futures.

Card sorts are so incredibly versatile for audience research – and they’re really simple to set up and complete. Our Research Analyst shares a few ways that we’ve used card sorts creatively.

If you ask us a question, you might hear us say “well, it depends”. Our Head of Research reflects on why we often need to know more context in order to answer a content strategy question.

An appraisal should serve you and your goals – and workshop activities can provide the space for you to explore that collaboratively. Our Research Analyst shares a few activities to help you reflect on your role whilst imagining your progression.

What tools and resources can help you as a content strategist? The Pickle Jar Communications team suggest some of their favourites.

Our Head of Research maps the online conversations and influence on Twitter during ContentEd 2019.

Are analytics the best place to look for data to inform new content decisions? Our CEO, Tracy Playle, argues why we shouldn’t base big decisions on analytics data.

Our Senior Content Strategist reflects on how we can creatively use our intranets to express the key priorities and values within our university strategies.

Our Head of Research spoke at Universities UK’s conference about mapping online influence – so he also created a post-conference map of social media conversations using the #UUKComms hashtag.