Social solutions
Social Research
Engage harder-to-reach communities on their terms and in their space.
Social research requires approaches that are as inclusive as they are insightful. incling's online community platform provides government bodies, policy makers, and service providers with an accessible, cost-effective way to engage diverse audiences, including groups that traditional research methods consistently fail to reach.
(inclusive, private participation)
The approach
How it works in practice
Digital ethnography for sensitive topics, policy consultation, service mapping, and longitudinal community panels.
01
Digital ethnography for sensitive topics
Use private, flexible diary tasks that allow participants to document their lived realities in their own time and space, capturing depth and honesty that standard interviews cannot achieve.
02
Policy review and consultation
Engage residents and service users in structured policy review tasks, gathering informed feedback on proposed changes, service redesigns, and new initiatives.
03
Service mapping with real users
Ask participants to document their experiences with existing services: what works, where barriers emerge, and what they need that is not currently available.
04
Longitudinal community panels
Build ongoing research communities that allow for sustained engagement over time, tracking how needs, attitudes, and experiences evolve as policies and services change.
Why incling
Why incling beats traditional research
In-person research excludes the hardest-to-reach groups. A private digital platform removes the barriers to honest participation.
| Traditional methods | incling Online Communities |
|---|---|
| In-person research excludes hard-to-reach groups | Digital platform removes participation barriers |
| Sensitive topics are handled poorly in formal settings | Private, flexible tasks encourage honest sharing |
| Limited depth in large-scale consultations | Qualitative and quantitative tools enable depth at scale |
| One-off engagement misses evolving needs | Longitudinal panels track experience over time |
Outcomes
What you will uncover
A rich evidence base grounded in real lived experience, not idealised survey answers.
Lived experience
Rich, contextual insight into how policies, services, and decisions affect the daily lives of the people they are designed for.
Coping strategies and service gaps
The ways residents navigate their needs and the specific barriers to accessing existing support, visible only when people feel safe enough to share.
Community priorities
What matters most to the communities you serve, in their own words, shaped by their own experiences.
Service design evidence
A rich evidence base that informs future service design, grounded in real resident behaviour, not idealised responses to formal questions.
Success stories
Understanding mental health support needs with Essex County Council
Mental health journeys are private and rarely linear, which formal interviews struggle to capture. A two-week community of 16 residents living with mental health needs let people share in their own time, producing strikingly creative, honest accounts that now ground how Essex evolves its services.
Read the full storySupporting library and reading engagement for Book Trust
Book Trust's Storytime pilot aimed to get less advantaged families into libraries, but some rarely visit. An ongoing community with the families closest to the programme showed what was working, gathered their own suggestions, and tested which concepts would actually build the reading habit.
Read the full storyReady to see incling in action?
Talk to the team about your research and see how social research with incling could work.