Sense
Research and insights manager
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About the Role
Sense has a fantastic opportunity for someone to join our team as our Research and Insights Manager. This is a full-time, hybrid role, working 37.5 hours per week based at our offices in Kings Cross, London.
This is an exciting time to join Sense, as we develop and embed our new organisational strategy and strengthen our approach to evidence-led decision-making. The role will play a central part in ensuring that insight, data, and stories are brought together into a coherent, trusted, and accessible evidence base, supporting learning, influencing, bold communications, and decision-making across Sense and driving our purpose to break down barriers alongside disabled people with complex needs.
The successful candidate will join a team that is ambitious about using insights, lived experience, and stories to drive change, alongside disabled people with complex needs. This is a pivotal role in strengthening how Sense understands what is happening for disabled people with complex needs and their families, and in ensuring that this insight consistently informs strategic decisions across the organisation, as well as providing a bedrock for our influencing work.
Key Responsibilities
- Manage Sense’s research, insight, and evidence work, setting clear priorities and ensuring delivery against organisational objectives.
- Line manage and develop research and insight staff (where applicable), creating a high-performing, collaborative, and inclusive team, working closely with teams across social change.
- Build strong working relationships across Sense, ensuring insight and evidence inform strategy, services, influencing, fundraising, and communications.
- Work with external partners, research agencies, and sector bodies to strengthen Sense’s evidence base and credibility, as well as design fundable insight projects with colleagues.
- Ensure delivery of high-quality, ethical, and inclusive insight, drawing on quantitative data, qualitative research, and lived experience.
- Commission and manage surveys, research, and evaluations through external agencies and partners, from brief development through to final outputs.
- Manage Sense’s insight, evidence, and story assets, including research, surveys, evaluation findings, and lived experience insight.
- Work with team members to develop and maintain systems and processes that enable insight, data, and stories to be stored, accessed, shared, and reused across the organisation.
- Synthesise insight from multiple sources into clear themes, narratives, and messages that support strategic decision-making.
- Ensure that Sense takes a stewardship approach to storytelling, so that lived experience stories are not repeatedly extracted for individual outputs, but are cared for, contextualised, and built into a growing, reusable body of organisational insight.
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Key Skills and Experience
- Significant experience in insight, evidence, research, evaluation, or learning roles, with a strong focus on how insight is used to inform organisational decision-making and social change.
- Demonstrable experience of working with lived experience insight, including gathering, analysing, and applying qualitative insight in ethical, inclusive, and empowering ways.
- Experience of commissioning and managing external research, surveys, or evaluations through agencies or consultants, from brief development to final outputs.
- A passionate commitment to take on the barriers disabled people face in society.
- A demonstrable commitment to delivering positive change in the lives of disabled people and their families.
- Knowledge of data protection, consent, and ethical standards, particularly in relation to lived experience and storytelling.
- Strong interpersonal and relationship-building skills, with the ability to influence and support senior leaders and teams to use insight confidently and appropriately.
About Sense
Sense is here to break down barriers alongside disabled people with complex needs. That's why we're committed to increasing the number of disabled people working across our organisation and creating an environment where everyone can thrive.
We actively encourage disabled people to apply for our vacancies and believe that a diverse range of perspectives, experiences, and talents makes us stronger.
We know there's always more we can do to become a truly inclusive employer, and we're working together to achieve that. Join us and help create the change thousands of disabled people with complex needs and families told us they want to see: a world without limits.
If you need us to adjust our recruitment process to help you access our vacancies, then please get in touch with a member of the talent acquisition team. We are a Disability Confident Leader and commit to interviewing disabled people who meet the minimum criteria for a role. More information on this can be found here Our commitment as an employer | Sense Careers.
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Our Values
Our values shape the way we behave and work alongside disabled people with complex needs to break down barriers:
- We’re creating change
- We’re always learning
- We’re better together
To Apply
Please use the link below to complete your application. Managers will use your application to shortlist candidates for interview; in relation to the Personal Specification. Therefore, it is very important you complete this section thoroughly. We would recommend that you read the candidate guidelines, job description, and person specification (found at the base of this advert) before applying.
Please note to avoid disappointment, we advise you to submit your application as soon as possible as we reserve the right to close posts at any time.
If you require any further assistance, please contact the Recruitment Team on 0121 393 4529 or recruitment@sense.org.uk
Sense is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of vulnerable children and adults and expects all employees to share this commitment. Therefore, all offers of employment, where appropriate, are subject to a DBS check; level dependent on the nature of the role.
For this role, we particularly welcome applications from candidates from underrepresented ethnic minority backgrounds and candidates with disabilities. Sense is committed to equality of opportunity, and to promoting and celebrating the diversity of staff, volunteers, and the people we work with. Everyone's contribution is valued, and we ensure they're given the opportunity to realise their potential. We welcome applications from talented people from all sections of the community who share our values and belief that no one, no matter how complex their disabilities, should be isolated, left out, or unable to fulfil their potential. For more information, please visit: https://www.sense.org.uk/about-us/equality-and-diversity/
No agency submissions please: any submissions without prior authorisation from the Sense Recruitment Team will be treated as our own and as such, no fee will be payable.
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