Six steps to mining and refining research gold.
If you don’t get started correctly, your data could be meaningless
“Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”
That has to be the most common statement I’ve heard in more than thirty years of presenting customer and participant survey research.
The statement can come as a question, such as:
“What, specifically, do I need to do to improve customer satisfaction?”
Or
“What words should I use in emails to improve participant engagement?”
Or
“What specific product or pricing changes should I make to grow market share?”
While simply stated, these are tough questions. But they deserve answers. Why do we use market, participant, or customer research if it is not to gain clear-cut answers?
First things first
If you don’t get started correctly, your data can be meaningless, or at worst, fatally flawed. I don’t have to tell you how risky it is to make decisions based on faulty data. And, unless you get your first things right, you may never know your data is flawed.
1. Define the Problem
Many folks skip this stage and jump immediately to drafting questions. Do this, and your research may address a problem but likely won’t address your problem.
In the words of motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”
2. Outline your Approach to the Problem
● Draft the Questionnaire
Do the questions address your problem. Are they flawed, such as double-barreled questions? That’s a question that asks two things at once — for example, your satisfaction with the speed and courtesy of the server at your favorite restaurant. If both are in a single question, you’ll never know if the survey respondent is unhappy with the speed, courtesy, or both.
What type of questions will you ask? Will you need open-ended responses, or use a five-point Likert scale with two positive, one neutral, and two negative ratings. Will you use a balanced or unbalanced scale? Are MaxDiff or Conjoint techniques a better fit for exploring your problem or opportunity?
3. Design your Research
● Get the Sample Right:
Who will you survey? How many people should your survey? Should you survey all your plan participants or a randomly selected sample?
What if you don’t have a good list? Can you use a convenience sample, such as surveying all your LinkedIn connections? If your LinkedIn connections look a lot like you in terms of education, industry, and income, you’ll be listening in an echo chamber.
● Data collection plan
How will you collect the data? Is it an online survey? Will it be distributed by email? Social media?
If you or your researcher don’t have these first things done, odds are your study is headed for a dusty shelf somewhere.
Get these first things done, and you’ll end up with a collection of data that needs to be summarized.
4. Create a Data Overview
Often, research reports begin and end with an overview section. This part gives a broad sense of what your participants think and do. You’ll see data summed up in box scores, based on five- or seven-point Likert scales. You may also see demographic differences such as gender, age, or marital status displayed in bar or pie charts.
This is the part of the presentation that has your plan committee leaning forward with interest.
However, every survey presentation moves to a single question: How do you know the accuracy and quality of your survey results? Do the results of a small number of responses reflect the perspectives of a much larger group?
If your sole litmus test is response rate, you’re at risk of discarding good data or accepting flawed data. Prepare for this question in the planning stage before you ever launch your survey. If you don’t, this is the stage when research projects die in forgotten binders on a dusty shelf.
Satisfy these challenging questions, and you face another tough one: “So what? What do we do with this information?” It will take more than tables and charts to answer this question.
5. Mine for Insights
The real opportunity for participant research lies beyond this pie chart purgatory in the beautiful land of data insights. If you’re lucky, you’ll find this paradise in the often missing “so what?” part of the report. This is where the bright furnace of statistics has transformed the rough ore of data into brilliant gold.
This refining process could include techniques such as correlation, regression, factor, or cluster analysis. And it is through this refining that you begin to understand the gold of relationships, presented with a color-rich picture of what matters most to the people you serve.
6. Turn Insights to Action
Turning those insights into action is the single most difficult challenge in applied research. And so we get back to the statement at the start of this podcast: “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”
Step one is to bridge the gap between the researcher and those responsible for doing the “what to do.”
I spend a great deal of my time these days in retirement education and communication. I’ve found it takes a bit of creative magic to transform the refined gold blocks of research into beautiful jewelry.
The challenge is to connect brilliantly creative writers and educators with blocks of data insights gold.
The magic that makes this work is transforming data into personas – archetypes built on data representing actual groups of participants. Toss in written comments from these participants so the creative can visualize, hear, and understand them.
A recent example for me was helping a team of communication and education pros visualize a real persona: A lower-income single mother with teenaged kids trying to figure out how to pay for prom dresses or soccer shoes.
The key here is creative empathy, combined with real-life experience. Many of us can picture that single mom with the face of someone we know, perhaps in our own family.
However, when our life experiences don’t give us that face, it’s an opportunity for action. Get your creative team in front of plan participants that fit those personas.
Success in education and communication is all about building relationships with those you serve. Generic content can never do that. Well-researched personas – based uniquely on your participants – will give your communication the authenticity that builds trust and engagement.
