Understanding diverse communities beyond demographics
SenateSHJ’s Cross-Cultural Research practice helps organisations understand this complexity and turn cultural insight into better strategy, engagement and decision-making.
Our work spans social, community, stakeholder and commercial research across Australia, the Asia-Pacific and beyond. We help organisations understand not only what diverse communities think, but why they think it, what shapes their attitudes and behaviours, and what this means for communications, policy, engagement, reputation, social licence and growth.
Research that reflects Australia today
Traditional research approaches can under-represent culturally diverse communities, particularly newer migrants and people who are less connected to mainstream institutions, research panels and communication channels.
Reaching these communities requires more than translation
It requires cultural intelligence, in-language research capability, appropriate methodology and an understanding of how different communities consume information, build trust and participate. Most importantly, it requires relationships.
For almost a decade, our cross-cultural research capability has worked alongside community organisations, peak bodies, multicultural media, intermediaries, advocates and community leaders. These relationships help us reach communities that conventional recruitment methods can miss and bring cultural context and lived experience into the way research is designed, conducted and interpreted.
Our ACCV research community
Our proprietary ACCV Panel is a dedicated multicultural research and engagement community with more than 1,000 active participants across Australia.
It enables us to conduct robust quantitative and qualitative research with culturally diverse audiences, including large-scale in-language research that can be difficult to achieve through mainstream research panels.
The panel has particular depth across Australia’s South Asian and Chinese diasporas, including newer migrants, while our broader community ecosystem enables us to recruit bespoke cultural and language groups according to each project’s needs.
Beyond the panel, we work with trusted specialist partners to design appropriate research with communities that can require different recruitment, engagement or governance approaches, including First Nations communities, refugees and people in less visible or harder-to-reach parts of the workforce and community.
Cross-border research and intelligence
Culture does not stop at Australia’s borders.
Our cross-border capability draws on extensive research experience across the Asia-Pacific to help Australian organisations understand overseas markets and international organisations navigate Australia.
We combine cultural, social and commercial research with market and stakeholder intelligence to understand differences in consumer behaviour, institutional environments, reputation, trust and expectations.
This can inform market entry, brand and reputation strategy, stakeholder engagement, social licence, communications, customer strategy and policy.
From cultural insight to action
Cross-cultural research should not end with identifying differences between communities.
Our researchers work alongside SenateSHJ’s engagement, reputation, change, social change and digital specialists to translate cultural insight into practical action.
That might mean identifying communities missing from an engagement program, understanding why trust in an organisation differs across cultural groups, designing culturally relevant behaviour change communications, testing a proposition before entering a new market, or identifying emerging reputation and social licence risks.
The objective is simple: to ensure the people organisations need to understand are represented in the evidence, and that cultural differences are understood well enough to shape what happens next.
