Case study · professional bodies
Mapping a profession beyond its borders.
A leading UK chartered professional body engaged SampleQuick to map every institution teaching its discipline outside the UK — a five-figure programme that delivered an evidenced, coverage-measured frame to underpin its international accreditation and expansion strategy.
The challenge
The body was scaling up its international ambitions. To accredit overseas programmes, build mutual-recognition relationships, and grow membership beyond the UK, its leadership needed an answer to a deceptively simple question: where in the world is our discipline actually taught — and how do we know that’s everyone?
Their existing view was, like most bodies’, a function of who had already come to them. Useful, but unmeasured and incomplete. For decisions of this weight, “the institutions we happen to know about” was not a defensible foundation.
The approach
We treated the task as building a registry-anchored sample frame, not compiling a list:
- Define the population and the denominator — the discipline, qualification levels, in-scope territories, and the authoritative registries that define how many institutions should exist in scope.
- Union the authoritative lists — combine the relevant registries into one de-duplicated population and establish the denominator.
- Discover what the registries miss — transnational education, dual-accredited programmes, and new entrants, each held to the same evidence standard.
- Evidence and screen every record — each institution attached to a public, citable evidence URL documenting why it qualified.
- Document coverage and compliance — a written coverage statement and a GDPR compliance pack.
What we delivered
- A registry-anchored frame of every in-scope institution teaching the discipline outside the UK, de-duplicated and screened.
- An evidence URL per institution — every record traceable to a public source.
- A documented coverage statement expressing completeness as a number against the unioned authoritative denominator.
- A GDPR compliance pack documenting lawful basis and provenance.
- A refreshable asset — built from registries, so it can be re-run and updated rather than rebuilt.
The engagement was a five-figure programme (~£100k scale), reflecting the breadth of the population and the evidence standard applied to every record.
The outcome
The body moved from an unmeasured internal view to a defensible, evidenced map it could put in front of its council, overseas regulators, and prospective partner institutions. The coverage statement gave leadership a credible, quantified answer to “how do we know this is everyone?” The frame now underpins decisions about which overseas programmes to accredit, which territories to prioritise, and where membership growth is realistic.
“We had years of contacts and a rough sense of the landscape. What we didn’t have was a map we could defend — one where every institution was sourced and we could state, as a number, how complete it was. That’s what changed the conversation in the room.” — Director of Education, chartered professional body