“At Bean, I really appreciate working with organisations and clients who are achieving positive outcomes for people and communities. Digging into numbers, visualising data and extracting a story from mountains of information are central to my work with Funders and it is extremely rewarding to see our work at Bean playing a part in improving social impact.”
Cath has worked with Bean Research since 2019, bringing extensive experience in the development and delivery of consumer and business intelligence, both agency and client-side.
With a Master’s in Business Science (Market Research) from the University of Cape Town, Cath has always valued rigorous research alongside clear communication, helping turn reliable evidence into useful and actionable insights. She began her career at the Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing at the University of Cape Town. After a brief stint in London, her time at TNS, now Kantar, led to a permanent move to the UK. She went on to hold roles at Kingston University and the then start-up Shazam, leading a wide range of market research projects.
Cath then spent 10 years at Mindshare, a global media and marketing services agency, as part of its business intelligence team, using data and insights to inform and support business decisions.
With more than six years at Bean, Cath has been central to our work with funders and foundations, helping them understand how their funding can support greater social change. Long-term relationships with organisations including the Goldsmiths’ Foundation, the Rayne Foundation, COSARAF, the Jack Petchey Foundation and the LTA Tennis Foundation have seen this work develop from data analysis and impact reporting into stronger evaluation and learning approaches. These help organisations make more informed strategic decisions, while also communicating and celebrating the outcomes of their grant-making.
More recently, Cath has enjoyed her role in developing clarity, analysis and insight for Social Return on Investment studies. She has also worked with smaller charities to simplify and strengthen their impact frameworks and evaluation approaches, allowing them to develop real focus on what is important to measure and talk to funders about.
Bean’s flexible and independent working environment suits Cath’s enjoyment of digging into the numbers, visualising data and extracting useful insights from large amounts of information. Drawing on experience across a wide range of research roles, she is equally at home in a spreadsheet, writing a questionnaire, running client workshops and focus groups, or briefing a research agency from the client side.
She is also Bean’s mapping guru, combining deprivation and social mobility indices with data on corporate presence, funding and interventions to help understand where activity and need intersect.
Get in touch with Cath
