Our strategy

Making Life Better: Having impact through social research

It has always been a privilege to lead the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) as its fourth CEO and during a period of organisational renewal and growth.

There have been so many highlights already, from celebrating our 50^th anniversary in 2019 to our role in recent years in supporting COVID-19 data collections. But we also recognise as an organisation that we need to continue to improve, adapt and innovate to maintain our relevance in a changing Britain with new and evolving customer needs.     

Our new strategy, “Making Life Better”, sets out the vision, future direction and our ambitions for NatCen in the 2020s and how we are going to achieve them.

NatCen’s reputation is built on its excellence in research methods and data collection, enabling the gathering, analysis and presentation of high-quality evidence to those with the power and influence to change people’s lives. As a not-for-profit organisation, we’re also trusted to listen to the public, uncovering and providing insights into the reality of people’s lives and society in the UK. Through explaining what people really think, feel and do, we help decision makers make better informed and more confident choices.

NatCen came into the 2020s in a very good place as an organisation. Over the next decade, we will build on our expertise, welcoming the change and opportunities in front of us in the UK and beyond. We will grow and develop our work by embracing the opportunities and challenges of using new modes of data collection, expand our evaluation programme to deliver a greater range of complex evaluations, build on our Centres of excellence, as well as diversify our portfolio into new areas of cross-cutting research topics and methods, and extend our reach geographically.

To our customers, we aspire to be fresh and innovative in what we do, to thrive as they grapple with and adapt to societal changes, using the best research methods and enabling technologies to improve what we can offer at competitive prices. But we also want to reach out to new customers, partners and stakeholders to increase our influence and impact. Please do join us in this journey by getting involved because we would love to hear from and work with you.

It is going to be an exciting future at NatCen. We promise to constantly strive to be the best we can be for our customers and the public because we believe passionately that social research has the power to make life better.

Guy Goodwin
Chief Executive
April 2023