Community insight for local decisions

Helping communities create
places, facilities and services
that people genuinely use.

Research by Robin helps councils, charities and community organisations understand what local people need before decisions are made.

Working on community facilities, S106 and CIL-funded projects, public services and future investment.

Based in Salisbury. Working across Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset.

Discuss a project
The problem
Good intentions
aren’t always
enough.

Many organisations want to make the right decisions. The challenge is that decisions about local services, facilities and investment are too often based on assumptions rather than evidence.

Some voices go unheard. Barriers remain hidden. Projects move forward without a clear understanding of what communities genuinely need.

The result can be underused facilities, low participation, and investment that doesn’t fully reflect community need.

Research by Robin helps organisations address this through community research, engagement and practical insight: surfacing real needs, identifying missing voices, and understanding barriers to participation before plans are finalised.

Methodology
Test small.
Learn fast.
Decide better.

Test and Learn is a way of working that builds evidence before scaling. Instead of designing a service or facility in detail and evaluating it after rollout, you test the critical assumptions early, learn quickly, and adapt based on what people genuinely need and do.

It’s the way good community research has always worked. Just usually without the formal label.

Aligned with
HM Treasury’s Magenta Book
Test and Learn annex, added May 2026. The Magenta Book is the UK government’s central guidance on evaluation.
“Learning how to improve in real-time.”

For councils, parish councils and community organisations, that matters in two ways. First, Test and Learn is now part of how central government expects evidence to be built. Second, and more importantly, it’s a more honest and efficient way to make decisions about places, facilities and services people will use.

In community settings, that looks like:

  • identifying the critical assumptions behind a project before plans harden
  • finding the voices missing from current engagement
  • exploring barriers to participation that aren’t visible from inside an organisation
  • building a shared understanding of how a place or service genuinely works
  • iterating based on evidence, not opinion, before money is committed
Practical evidence councils and communities can act on. Not a document that sits in a drawer.
What I help with
Four ways I help
communities and
their organisations.

Most projects involve a mix of these. Scope and approach are shaped around the decision you’re trying to make, not a fixed package.

Service one
Community Facilities & Local Investment

Helping organisations understand what communities need before investing in new facilities, public spaces or local projects.

Including
  • S106 projects
  • CIL-funded projects
  • Community hubs
  • Village halls
  • Sports facilities
  • Youth provision
  • Public spaces
Service two
Community Needs Assessments

Research that identifies local priorities, gaps in provision and opportunities for investment. Useful for funding bids, business cases and council strategy work where the evidence needs to stand up to scrutiny.

Service three
Community Engagement

Meaningful conversations with residents, service users and stakeholders. Designed to go beyond traditional consultation exercises, and to reach the people who don’t usually take part.

Service four
Participation & Accessibility

Understanding why people don’t use services, facilities or activities, and what would genuinely change that. The hidden barriers, the practical ones, and the assumptions that keep them in place.

Where to start
Start with a
Community Insight
Sprint.

The Community Insight Sprint is a focused 2-4 week piece of work that gives you a clear, evidenced picture of what your community needs before plans are finalised or money is committed.

Useful when you’re applying for funding, planning a new facility, reviewing an existing service, or trying to understand why participation is declining.

What’s included
  • An initial discovery session to scope the question
  • Stakeholder conversations and community interviews
  • Review of existing evidence and feedback
  • Identification of key themes, missing voices and unmet needs
  • A summary report with practical recommendations
Ideal for
  • Parish, town & city councils
  • Charities & CICs
  • Community groups
  • S106 & CIL projects
  • Community centres
  • Sports clubs & voluntary orgs
  • Funding & grant applications
  • Early-stage planning
Let’s talk about a Sprint
Scope and pricing tailored to your project.
A different approach
Who isn’t
in the room?

Many consultations hear repeatedly from the same people. They’re the ones who turn up to meetings, fill in surveys, sit on committees. Their input matters, but it’s rarely the whole picture.

The harder, more useful question is who isn’t in the room. And why.

My work focuses on three things the usual feedback channels often miss:

  • missing voices: the people whose views never make it into the consultation
  • barriers to participation: what stops people taking part in the first place
  • unmet needs: what current provision doesn’t reach, and why

The point is to make sure decisions reflect the wider community, not just the usual feedback channels. That’s how investment ends up where it should, and how facilities end up being places people genuinely use.

Why this matters
It’s not just
about the building.

Good community facilities do more than provide a building or a service. They create places where people connect, participate and belong.

Understanding what communities need before decisions are made helps organisations invest with confidence, and create places that people genuinely value and use.

Because the cost of getting it wrong is always higher than the cost of listening first.

Example projects
The kind of work
I’m here for.

Live case study highlighted. Others shown as illustrative examples of the questions I work on.

Live case study · Salisbury
What spaces are missing in Salisbury?

A self-led case study exploring the places, facilities and opportunities residents feel the city needs, and what this reveals about gaps in provision. In progress.

→
Parish council / Facilities
“What should the new village hall really do?”

A parish council planning a new community building. Research uncovers which groups would genuinely use it, when, and what existing provision is missing before designs are drawn up.

→
Town council / S106
“What should this money pay for?”

Section 106 funding becomes available with options on the table. Structured engagement with residents identifies investment priorities, properly evidenced so the decision holds up.

→
Local authority / CIL
“Who isn’t being heard?”

A CIL consultation keeps reaching the same residents. Targeted research finds the missing voices, what they’d prioritise, and why current routes aren’t working for them.

→
Neighbourhood plan
“What kind of place do we want next?”

A parish drafting its neighbourhood plan needs to evidence what residents value about the place and what should change. Conversations across age groups shape the plan.

→
CIC / Participation
“Why do people drop out?”

A community sports organisation wants to understand who stops participating, when, and why, so investment in coaching and facilities goes where it’ll make a difference.

→
Nicola Harrington, qualitative community researcher
“After 10 years in London, I moved to Salisbury in 2005. Locals call it ‘Smallsbury’. Once you’ve lived here a while, you know why.”
Public sector background
  • Home Office
  • Department of Health
  • UKHSA
  • National Crime Agency
  • Metropolitan Police
  • London Ambulance Service
  • NHS England
  • Roke Manor Research

I’m Nicola Harrington. My background includes community research, discovery and service design work across central government, public health, emergency services and local communities. That’s included time inside the Home Office, UKHSA, the National Crime Agency, the Metropolitan Police, London Ambulance Service, the Department of Health and NHS England, and four years at Roke Manor Research leading discovery work across public sector programmes.

Across all of that work I kept seeing the same thing: the people most affected by decisions were often the least involved in shaping them. Or if they were involved, the wrong questions had been asked of the wrong people.

Research by Robin was created to help organisations understand communities before decisions are made, turning insight into practical action and places people genuinely use. Getting this wrong is expensive, not always in obvious ways, but in wasted effort, facilities that go underused, and investment that doesn’t land where it should.

I have ADHD, which has sharpened how I think about the gap between how things are supposed to work and how they really work in practice. I take that question seriously in every project.

I believe good decisions start with real conversations, not assumptions.

With a teenage son racing nationally in cycling (and me mostly watching from the sidelines wondering how he got so fast), I have a particular curiosity about what keeps people in grassroots sport and what pushes them out, and how those same questions apply to community life more broadly.

Alongside client work, I’m currently developing What Spaces Are Missing in Salisbury?, a local case study exploring the places, facilities and opportunities residents feel the city needs, and what this reveals about gaps in provision.

I use AI and digital tools carefully and practically to organise findings, simplify outputs, or help organisations work through ideas but never as a replacement for listening to people properly.

Based in
Salisbury · Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset
Available remotely for the right project.
Current projects
Working on something the community will genuinely use?

I’m currently taking on a small number of carefully selected projects.

Most of the work I’m interested in involves understanding:

  • what a community genuinely needs before money is spent or facilities are built
  • which voices are missing from current engagement
  • what the evidence base needs to look like for a funding bid, business case or planning decision

Where appropriate, projects may later be documented as case studies, always with your agreement, so others can learn from the work too.

Talk to me about your project

Not sure if it’s the right fit? Drop me a line anyway. Not every conversation needs to turn into a project.

Why ‘Research by Robin’?

Firstly, I prefer it to my name! But also… Robins are curious. So am I. Robins are trusted. So am I. Robins know their patch. So do I.

I know my patch, but I’m curious about yours.