This summer marked the end of my placement year with the Political team at market research company YouGov - and yes, I got to work the general election! But before I detail the excitement and buzz of the election period, let me tell you a little bit about YouGov and what I got up to day-to-day.
About YouGov
YouGov is an international online research data group and is the most quoted market research source in the world. Over 27 million people are registered on the panel, with operations in the UK, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, India and Asia Pacific. Clients include political parties, pressure groups, charities, media, government departments and academics.
My Role
As the placement student, my role was processing and tabling up internal and client results from our daily polls using SPSS and RStudio. This included our weekly voting intention data which we give exclusively to The Times.
Once I gained confidence in this, about 2-3 months in, I got to work with clients directly on questionnaire design. I'm such a people-person so this was right up my street. I regularly phoned and video-called high-profile clients to talk them through the process and find out what they wanted to achieve from their surveys. The Gold Scholarship networking skills sessions really helped with this as I already knew how to talk professionally and 'sell' myself, or rather, in this case, sell the research!
Clients I worked with have included The Times, Sky News, BBC, King's College London, Greenpeace, the Greater London Authority, and many many more. In May, I started working with the charity Theirworld on their LGBTQ+ task force project. This client came to us asking for a sample of 500 LGBTQ+ 16-24 year olds, an extremely niche sample that YouGov had never attempted before. I lead this project and was able to deliver some very useful results to the client, which got considerable media pickup! (https://theirworld.org/news/survey-reveals-widespread-unreported-bullying-and-discrimination-among-lgbtq-youth-in-schools/#:~:text=A%20further%20one%20in%20four,report%20the%20bullying%20to%20anyone.)
Eurotrack
It was also my responsibility to manage YouGov’s Eurotrack project, a set of surveys that run in seven European countries: UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Denmark. I prepared the scripts, maintained a positive relationship between the YouGov hubs, and processed the results for publication. I also ran my own questions on Eurotrack a couple times, asking about Eurovision and whether Israel should compete and what Europe's favourite cuisines are. Writing up the results, I got my first taste of data journalism which I really really enjoyed!
2024 General Election
Now, the election. No one expected it to be announced for the summer, so I assumed I'd just miss out on the opportunity. But lo and behold!
This was such an exciting time in the team, and though at times it was stressful working those long hours and to tight deadlines, I wish I could do it all again.
One of my highlights is working on the debate polls for Sky News. Each time there was a leaders debate, we ran a snap poll as soon as it finished. We were able to process results in minutes, and my role was to format the tables as soon as possible. Sending the results to Sky and watching Sam Coates read the results live on air just moments later was such a surreal experience, and so rewarding.
I also worked on YouGov’s MRP, which stands for Multi-level Regression with Post-stratification (mouthful, I know).
Essentially it's a big BIG survey of tens of thousands of people that gives constituency-level projections for who's going to win (so much more detailed than your usual 2,000 sample voting intention surveys).
I got to input loads of previous election data into a model and then once it was ready, I analysed the results to check for any anomalies. Once again I got to do some more journalism, writing up our projections for southern England (https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49950-final-yougov-mrp-shows-labour-on-course-for-historic-election-victory).
Now for some fun extra highlights:
- Weekly happy hour
- Volunteering trip to the Felix Project
- Monthly art classes
- Super fun team socials
- YouGov Sports Day
- Winning July 2024 Employee of the Month!
Over the last year I have learnt so much about how a 9-5 job works, and how to balance it with my personal life. I’ve managed to work a job and keep up my love of theatre, performing in two shows this year! I’ve also learnt so many IT skills I didn’t have before, how to keep professional relationships within the company and with clients, and more about how political polling works.
I’ve made so many friends whilst on placement who I’ve met up with outside the office, and plan to when I come back to London during the next year. I’ve loved working in such a fun, supportive team and office and will miss everyone so much!
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