Carl Shoben, a communications and strategy specialist with 15 years leading change, public health campaigns and crisis communications in the NHS, and former Downing Street special adviser, has been appointed to lead a strengthened strategic communications arm of polling and research firm Survation.

Madhur Mehra, a seasoned consumer insight professional, brings 20 years of Market Research expertise and has been appointed as Survation’s Director of Research. Madhur, most recently a Senior Director at Ipsos Mori, having been at the firm for 6 years prior was also Head of Consumer Insights for Nielsen UK & Ireland 2016-2019 and began his career in India for NFO, GfK Mode before joining Kantar in the UK.

He brings in-depth experience in quantitative consumer insights, brand tracking, market understanding and innovation & new product development and has worked across sectors ranging from CPG to Finance, Telecom and Luxury.

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Carl and Madhur join forces with Survation’s existing Strategic Qualitative Consultant Jane Carn, who formerly led YouGov’s qual team, and previously, a director at Ipsos Mori and ICM Research.

The new hires will join founder and Chief Executive Damian Lyons Lowe, to boost Survation’s insight, branding and Strategic Communications services – targeted toward companies and organisations that need to make evidence based decisions that are driven by accurate data and insight.

This “full suite” of senior professionals leading teams internally will ensure campaigns and programmes are fully integrated and delivered through data analysis, strategy and message development to on the ground deployment to multi audiences and channels.

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Madhur Mehra,  Survation’s new Director of Research said,

“Survation is an innovative and creative mixed method market researcher, best known for being the only company to predict the 2017 hung parliament using all methods – telephone, online polling as well as using advanced data science – multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP).

Their data science offering – led by Professor Chris Hanretty and the team at Royal Holloway was a particular draw for me, especially following up their 2017 success in 2019 by providing the most accurate MRP election seats forecast ever conducted.

I will be bringing my 20 years of working with large international companies on their commercial research and branding experience to create new tools and services to leverage Survation’s leadership in advanced data science methodology to provide clients a deeper understanding than at present of their brand and core target audience.“

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Carl Shoben, Survation’s new Director of Strategic Communications said:

“After two decades advising public service and political leaders in strategic communications,  and working in the NHS to bring about better engagement both internally and with the public and patients, it’s very exciting to be linking up with one of the country’s leading polling and research companies.

I’ve joined Survation at a time when the UK’s focus needs to be coping with the Covid-19 crisis, and we have therefore made a start in pulling together all of our skills and experience to help the NHS, companies and organisations deal with the crisis in a way which protects the health of their staff and public, and manages business continuity as well as is possible in the circumstances. I have written a guide, which is an open access resource to help companies and services with their internal and public communications and are offering support to anyone who wants further advice.“

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Survation Chief Executive and founder Damian Lyons Lowe, said:

“Given the unprecedented challenge facing the UK’s businesses, workers, vulnerable groups and society as a whole at the current time, we are very fortunate to have assembled such an experienced leadership team. This is of course an important time for research organisations who are trusted sources of opinion based statistics, data but what is more important is that genuine insight is gained from that data to help direct actionable strategic decisions.”

The team has hit the ground running, providing open access resources which are listed below.

1. Initiation of segmented UK population tracking on COVID-19, with a specific focus on the degree of preparedness of UK businesses. We are also tracking general population attitudes, workers including the self-employed, HR professionals, self employed professionals and students (including students who work)