How Researchers Can Avoid Contract Pitfalls Today (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hi, friends. I'm Katherine Korostow from Research Rockstar, and thanks for joining me for another conversation for Research Rockstars. Today, let's talk about contracts. Now, as market research and insights professionals, contracts might not be our favorite part of our job, but they do cross our desks. Whether you work at a research agency, some other kind of supplier, whether you work on an insights team and a client-side organization, or maybe you're a contractor, you do encounter contracts, and they can make or break a project. Now, even if the final review is handled by a colleague in purchasing or your legal department, which is great, we still, as the research professionals, need to know enough so that we can spot red flags because contracts do basically set the ground rules for the engagement, what's allowed, what's not, et cetera. And so we want to make sure that the contracts are correct. It protects us, and it protects our clients and our partners. So for this conversation, I'm bringing in an excerpt from a conversation I had a couple of months ago with the wonderful Benjamin de Sengalt from Market Vision Research. He and I had been having a conversation about various legal and ethical issues in market research, and we also enjoyed some really interesting tangents into AI and the impact of that on our work as market researchers, including some legal implications. And he talked in that conversation a bit about contracts, so I do want to bring in his clip so that he can share from his expert point of view what some of the concerns are these days that we do need to be aware of. So enjoy that clip, and then we'll come back, and I'm going to close with four important tips that every market researcher should know about contracts.

[00:01:42] Speaker 2: One of the side effects of the advent of privacy regulation around the world has been that contracts have become much bigger and more cumbersome. And with bigger and more cumbersome contracts comes a significantly reduced ability to be nimble. Ten years ago, when in my original life in the research industry, I don't want to say it was the Wild West, but you could kind of figure it out as you went along. You didn't need to decide everything at the beginning and then stick to that. You could be a little flexible with, oh, client, you've changed your mind halfway through? Well, that's fine. We can accommodate that. Those days are kind of over, where now you need to know what you're going to do and then stick to it, and that particularly when it comes to data handling, because post-2018, as every other country has come up with some sort of answer to GDPR, a lot of what you can do is included in the contract.

[00:02:50] Speaker 1: I really hope you enjoyed those words of wisdom from Benjamin. I always appreciate his point of view and his expertise. And again, nobody's expecting us as market research and insights professionals to be legal experts, but I do want to make sure that you know enough so that if you see something, you can raise that red flag. And here's four final points I want to make about this topic. First of all, you're not a legal expert. I'm not a legal expert. I've seen hundreds of research-related contracts in my career, and I still know enough to know I don't know everything. But what I have learned time and time again is that I have to apply my researcher's eye to make sure the contract is precise. Use your knowledge about research methodology, about data analysis planning. Really get into that level of detail as applicable so that you can put things in the contract that are specific. One of the things that can really hurt us in research is when the specifications in a contract are too vague. My favorite nightmare story that I have seen too many researchers run into, and early in my career I made this mistake myself, is when they say in the contract, for example, that they are going to be delivering a research report. That's great, but what kind of research report? A written report? A slide style report? If it's a slide style, does the client prefer it be in Google Slides or in PowerPoint or something else? And how many pages? Is the client expecting a 200-page report where every survey question is presented in four different charts and graphs? These days clients don't really want that, but the example applies just in terms of you don't know what people are going to be assuming. So to put in the contract, I'm delivering a report, but without saying what kind of report, what format, what length, that's the kind of stuff that can really cause heartache later if you and the other party made different assumptions about what the scope of a research report should include. So you put on your researcher's hat as you're going through a contract. Anything that you feel is vague, make it precise. Use your knowledge of research processes and best practices to make sure everything is super precise. And of course we always want to honor respondent agreements. Whether you're recruiting for qualitative research or survey research, many of us in research have to deal with things related to consent forms. And things related to consent forms and stated privacy policies that we might be sharing with participants, those are all important contractual obligations and we never want to break those. And especially these days because we do know that there's a lot of privacy laws out there and there's teeth behind these privacy laws, right? So we don't want to break any laws inadvertently. We want to make sure that any agreements we make we truly do honor. And if things change over the course of a project where maybe the use of the data is now going to be different, well that can happen. It's pretty unusual in my experience but it can happen. For example, I have done studies where first we were doing IDIs purely for research purposes but then the client wanted to find out, hey could we use some of these IDIs to repurpose into training materials? We want to train our employees and having some of these IDI clips would really help. Well then we have to go and ask for consent. We can't just repurpose it. If we told people that their IDI interviews were anonymous and were only going to be used in aggregate with the responses that we received from other people, we can't then put them into a training video, for example. Make sure that you get documentation of any change that happens. I know that once the contract is ready and we're, you know, ready to go, we all want to jump right into the project and that's fantastic. So if we take the case perhaps of a qualitative research project and everything in this contract is really precise and really good but maybe like a week into it the client realizes that they need to add some screening criteria for the recruiting that they hadn't originally anticipated. That's okay but we need to get that in writing. Why? Because it's a change that could have an impact on the time and cost of the project. Maybe they're adding a criteria that's going to make it a lot harder to recruit people. Maybe your cost of recruiting qualified participants is going to increase 20%. Any change that happens after the project starts needs to be documented, especially if it has anything that could impact cost or time or deliverables, right? So we want to make sure we get those and sometimes, you know, it doesn't have to always be a formal change order. It can be an email perhaps but make sure it's in writing just to make sure that everybody understands and that there is some sort of paper trail, even if it's an electronic paper trail. And my last tip for you as a research and insights professional is to just be alert to problematic requests. Requests you might get from stakeholders or clients or other partners and very often it's unintentional. You know, sometimes you will have somebody ask for something that you as a researcher know is unethical at minimum and potentially even illegal. Before you react to it, just understand that it's probably unintentional. They honestly may not know. I can't tell you how many times in my career I have done survey research with a client and then the client says, oh great, now I'd like the list of everybody who participated and, you know, I want their, you know, their email appended to their survey record. No, that's unethical and illegal in most cases. So, but the clients don't know that, you know, they're in marketing. They're thinking, oh this is great. I just did this satisfaction survey. I'm seeing all these great results. I want to contact some of these people or I did a satisfaction survey and I'm seeing some negative results and I want to follow up with some of these people for various reasons. And again, they may be very well-intentioned and they feel like, oh well, I paid for this data and we have to kind of let them know that that's not how it works. We did promise anonymity. There was probably some sort of privacy document promise and so we need to make sure that we don't break those respondent agreements and so that's a great example of a client or stakeholder who assumes that it's okay for you to identify participants when in fact it is not. So, when in doubt, I always will refer them to known professional codes of ethics. We have codes of ethics and standards from all of the major professional associations, including the Insights Association and APOR. So, if you're not familiar with those, I really recommend going to their websites and reading those because it's really fascinating and it's a great way for you to be able to say to perhaps somebody who is unintentionally trying to get you to do something that might be a little bit off to be able to say, you know, these are professional standards and here, you know, here's a link. You can go read them for yourself and that way you're not the bad guy, right? And so you're just really educating them about what is considered professional, what is and isn't considered ethical in the world of qualitative and quantitative research. So, I hope those tips are helpful to you and I know that there's a lot more to this topic and we do have an entire course on it for those of you who are interested in learning more. So, over at Research Rockstar, you can check out our ethical and legal topics for market researchers and that is available online if you want to learn more about this topic. I hope you enjoyed this conversation for Research Rockstars and if you did enjoy it, if you could give us a like or subscribe, I sure would appreciate it. And if you have any questions at all, please do post them in the comments below. I'm always happy to answer questions. Thanks.