What our clients say
Working with us means having a partner who gets excited about your research and is passionate about bringing it to life with creative visuals. By communicating your findings in accessible and creative ways, we maximise the reach of your research to targeted stakeholders.
“Over a period of six months, Mihaela and her team worked with me to produce four outputs that clearly conveyed the results of a funded project on the geographies of austerity. With their advice and guidance, I was able to translate complex research findings into a language and style of communication that is accessible and interesting to non-experts and additionally develop a strategy for enabling my research to make a demonstrable contribution beyond the academy.
Through conversations with Mihaela, I was pushed to reflect upon how I communicate with public and third sector organisations, as well as the general public, and receive expert insight on how best to deliver my research findings to these diverse audiences going forward.”
Prof Julie MacLeavy, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Bristol
“Mihaela and her team worked with us to produce a clean and coherent set of infographics and supporting materials such as a presentation and supporting graphics for a webpage. They were incredibly responsive to our feedback and willing to take on board more difficult tasks such as making all the materials editable so that we could update them over time.”
Dr John Holmes, Reader in Alcohol Policy, Sheffield Alcohol Research Group at ScHARR
“Research Retold collaborated with us to produce key messages for an evaluation. This meant working closely with a range of stakeholders in the project. Everyone was very happy with the graphic. It is being used to increase understanding of the service and inform decision making – which was what we hoped it would do!”
Dr Janet Harris, Reader in Knowledge Mobilisation, Scharr, University of Sheffield
“I had produced a report for the Petitions Committee in the UK Parliament and wanted to have something that communicated the report in a quicker and more effective manner, thinking of busy politicians and officials. ResearchRetold did this for me. They produced a fantastic brief, accompanied by very useful material that I could easily integrate into social media.
I have been very impressed with them. Throughout the process, they were very good at making sure they understood which key messages I wanted to focus on. I was very impressed with their professionalism and on how they built in feedback to fully understand what I was after for my audience. I’d have no hesitation in recommending them. It’s been a true delight working with them.”
Prof Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Professor of Politics, POLIS, University of Leeds
“Mihaela has been fantastic at listening to our objectives and taking extreme care in producing a visual summary which has been widely praised by the intended audiences. She and her team offered a sterling service throughout the process of production and rectified issues diligently, always making sure we were satisfied with final product.”
Dr Ana Aliverti, Director of the Criminal Justice Centre, Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Warwick
“I am looking forward to sharing the visual summary widely. Thanks very much for being so accommodating with making the changes we wanted throughout the process and for the patience as we ourselves worked out what we needed our key messages to be. For us, this has been a key part of the process and will also help us as we prepare other related outputs from the research.”
Dr Amy Barnes, Lecturer in Public Health Policy, University of Sheffield
“The visual summary significantly enhances our ability to communicate with non-academic audiences, share the key ideas behind the Data Journeys methodology, showcase work going on at the School, and make people aware of opportunities for collaboration. We’ve used the visual summary to create postcards for distribution at various events, and we’ve also used it in a piece in a national publication aimed at information professionals. Everyone has commented on how well produced the visualisation is.”
Dr Jo Bates, Lecturer in Information Politics and Policy, University of Sheffield
“The team are happy with the briefs created by Research Retold, they look great. For me, the differentiator is that the Research Retold team are able to do nice graphics, but also (crucially) engage with the material and get it across in a clever way, i.e. add value. We have occasionally used non-UK based, cheaper graphics houses who don’t do the latter.”
Ewan Snedden, Director Monitoring and Evaluation, WYG
“I was really impressed with the speed at which the team grasped the research content and their ability to condense and present this in a highly accessible and engaging way using infographics and neat design; the key messages were distilled and presented very well. I am used to writing in different styles and for different audiences but this only goes so far – the use of graphics is a powerful way to convey research messages. While I have been happy to have a go at this in the past, I am not a graphic designer so the final product is limited by what I can imagine and produce. In Research Retold we had a partner who both understood the research content AND how to present it.”
Kathleen Latimer, Associate Director Monitoring and Evaluation, WYG
“Research Retold had a sensitivity to the ideas which I as a researcher wanted to get across. They also had the design skills to turn those ideas into something that people outside academia really wanted to engage with.”
Dr James Harrison, Reader, University of Warwick
“I found it energising to work with Research Retold and their tools and techniques were powerful. Their storyboarding helped us to reach a person-centred approach to communicating information about social prescribing. The comic strip unlocked rich conversation and deeper understanding. We gained great value from it.”
Helen Sims, Business Growth Manager, Voluntary Action Sheffield
“We had a great time working with Mihaela and the team. We were delighted to be able to work with people who understood what we wanted to achieve and then expertly guided us through the process of creating the right message and right look.”
Prof Mark Connelly, Professor of Modern British History, University of Kent
“It has been a delight working with Mihaela and her team! The transformation of a very text-heavy report into sharp and easy-to-understand visuals was astounding. Throughout this engagement, Mihaela has been responsive to our needs, solution-oriented and flexible in the ideation which led to a very dynamic creative process. This enabled us to reflect critically on how to communicate research better and we look forward to working together on many more exciting projects.”
Harveen Kour, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Manager, Fairtrade International
“Research Retold have collaborated with us to initiate and develop a series of policy briefs for our research, teaching and knowledge transfer centre that reflects the style and substance of each of the individual pieces of research in the policy briefs, and that of the centre as a whole. They have the ability to distil down complex ideas into visually appealing and textually succinct platforms for broader policy engagement and public consumption.
Their unique selling point is their academic empathy which enables them to drill down and understand what it is we are trying to get at in text and visuals that other people can understand! Working with them has been insightful and joyful.”
Dr Celine Tan, Associate Professor, University of Warwick
“We have worked with Research Retold on three evaluation projects since 2016. It’s much more useful when these projects are put it into a format that is more easy to communicate to other people, particularly non-specialists. Research Retold has got a good base from where to grow, and I look forward to working with them in the future and to see their work on other projects!”
Kyla Reid, Associate Director – Programme Management & Policy Advice, WYG
“I heard about Research Retold through a colleague during a discussion on how to improve our impact in the university. As a busy academic, it’s very nice having someone who sits on your head and keeps you in the loop. I really appreciated how adaptable and collaborative Mihaela was – we had a really nice working relationship!”
Prof Caroline Dyer, Professor of Education and International Development, POLIS, University of Leeds
“Taking a lead from my time as a finance lawyer, I had been pushing for a briefing series for some time, and Research Retold had the knowhow to bring it into being. Mihaela’s professional approach delivered exactly what I was looking for, from the initial planning stage for the whole series to the swift turnaround of my own briefing note.”
Dr Stephen Connelly, Assistant Professor, School of Law, University of Warwick
“Working with Research Retold was an enlightening and rewarding experience, giving me a much better insight into how academic research can be translated into specific policy proposals for a non-expert audience. Mihaela’s support in condensing complex issues and providing helpful critiques of numerous drafts was invaluable.”
Dr Ben Farrand, Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Warwick
“The briefing document was very well received. It really assisted with the presentation of our research findings from the second stage of our research project and enabled them to be portrayed in an engaging manner which for our policy audience was very important. As always the work that Research Retold undertook has been excellent and we are delighted with the impact it has had and the clarity it provides to policy audiences.”
Pf Adrian Smith, Professor of Human Geography and Dean for Research, Queen Mary University London
“We were very happy with the outputs produced by the Research Retold team. They are clearly a team of specialists, able to take complex, academic research and translate it into creative, digestible and visually attractive summaries, pulling out the most important messages. It is great to have a partner that understands and is interested in the research content of our work, especially given that it is often quite technical.”
Sophie Timms, Principal Consultant, WYG
“Working with Research Retold has been such a positive experience! We chose them as our missions are very aligned: to increase public engagement in research. Not only have they produced beautiful designs, they have also given us excellent advice, worked to deadlines and were really welcoming of feedback. Most importantly the resulting impact report is superb and we are very proud.”
Dr Rebecca McKelvey, Founder and Director, In2ScienceUK
“It was a wonderful experience working with the highly professional Research Retold team. The visual summary they produced for us was simple, logical, easy to understand, appealing and did justice to the project in a way that I could not. We now use the visual summaries for all our events with service users, healthcare professionals, academics and policymakers.”
Dr Anju Keetharuth, Researcher in Health Economics, University of Sheffield
Research communication newsletter
Best practices, news and resources for research communication. We’re dedicated to providing our community with useful ideas, tips, funding opportunities and case studies to help you communicate complex research with impact.
