Audience research: Should you do it yourself or commission external researchers?

Author: Sarah Fitzgerald Director, Self Communications

There are things you can do yourself, but it’s important to consider how to balance developing and deploying your own internal capabilities, and ensuring high-quality, robust results. You'll find it's a trade off between cost, time and expertise. Don't forget, it's not just the obvious designing questionnaires or running focus groups. External expertise is wide-ranging and might include:

audience selection, recruitment, access and reach
creativity and design of stimulus materials
knowledge and access to a wider range of researchers
understanding of suitable research facilities
alternative complementary methods such as social listening
questionnaire editing/proof reading capability
transcription or translation services
presentation of data in suitable formats

Before you plan your next audience research exercise, here are some questions to ask yourself.

What is the research for?

Start with your objectives.
If your research is to inform organisation-wide strategy and major future investment, or for campaigning for a multi-million government funding, then you’ll need a robust research study that is independent, replicable and trustworthy. For this, you'll need to commission agencies who can demonstrate rigour in their approach, appropriate previous experience and quality-assured processes.

But don’t let the 'perfect be the enemy of the good'. This is especially true if you’re starting out and have little information about your audience. If you already have the channels and target market data in a suitable format, just go for it, particularly if budget is an issue. You may need to accept the limitations of your research design, but it will still provide a lot of useful insight. Just make sure you don't spend your entire marketing and communications budget behind the conclusions.

Who are you researching?

If your audience is clearly defined, aware of your services and have provided their contact details, undertaking research in-house will be much easier. If the right consents are in place, employees, volunteers, supporters and service users can be contacted directly and invited to participate in surveys or other kinds of studies.

If your aim is to reach people beyond your database, you can recruit respondents using social media channels, and your public and professional networks. I recently worked with a sight loss charity who attracted almost 1,000 survey participants by promoting it through personal channels, networks, online support communities and via healthcare professionals. 30% of these respondents had no previous contact with the charity.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to find completely new market segments to expand into, then you’re likely to need external support to conduct this research. You may need a nationally representative survey sample, with a questionnaire testing multiple variables. You may also need expertise in analysing the data that results from this kind of exploratory research, using tools like factor or cluster analysis to identify addressable audiences and drivers of engagement. Sometimes these skills already exist in your organisation, often outside of marketing and communications – but you may need to buy them in.

Even when your budget is tiny, you can still research a new audience. I worked with a domestic abuse charity who wanted to find their first mass fundraising audience and segment it. We developed a hypothetical ‘ideal’ supporter profile, taking into account demographics, values, attitudes and behaviours. We then worked with a large local employer, who kindly brought together staff matching the profile to participate in focus groups. The company even donated use of its premises for evening focus group sessions.

What type of research are you doing?

Surveys are easy to put together in-house using platforms like SurveyMonkey which provide the functionality although skills in survey design would be beneficial. When building your own survey, check each question carefully as there are pitfalls to watch out for, for example:

is the question clear and unambiguous?
do you give too many options? or force a response?
are the rating scales evenly balanced with appropriate wording?
do you use one question type too often, causing respondent fatigue?
do any of your questions lead people to choose a particular response?
do you include images, hyperlinks or explanations to help respondents?
are multiple choice answer choices too similar or vary in length, tone and style?

Fortunately there are lots of free and paid-for resources and training courses on good survey design, so think about up-skilling your staff.

Equally important is being clear on the purpose of each question. Are you willing and able to take action on the basis of the responses you receive? A lot of people pack surveys with questions just because they’re curious to know the answers – not because the data will help guide action. This is where an external researcher or agency can help, because they challenge you to justify each question, as well as helping with the wording, and with post-survey data analysis.

If it’s qualitative research e.g. interviews or focus groups, many of the same considerations apply. However, further issues arise regarding who is asking questions and who is facilitating groups. ‘Social desirability bias’ is the term used by researchers to describe how we tend to provide answers to questions that don’t reflect what we actually think, but what we believe the questioner or people around us want to hear. All researchers have to be aware of this. A skilled facilitator will ensure they don’t ‘lead’ the group, instead probing superficial responses to get at the underlying beliefs, and helping create an environment where people feel safe to speak honestly and confidentially. So if you’re using in-house staff to play this role, consider providing training for them in listening and facilitation techniques, so that they don’t inadvertently influence what groups and interviewees say.

What do you want to know?

There is a risk when using in-house staff that participants won’t see the researcher as neutral. Let’s say you’re running focus groups to uncover attitudes towards your organisation among the people your charity supports. Remember, there are power dynamics at play. Research participants may consciously or unconsciously respond to these, for example, being unwilling to be overly critical when speaking with a representative of the charity. Or they do the opposite, and take the opportunity to tell you everything they think is wrong with how you do things, whether it’s on topic or not. We call it the 'horns and halo' effect!

It’s also possible that an in-house researcher may step out of their facilitator role and get involved in the discussion from a personal perspective. I once facilitated focus groups on behalf of a health charity, with support from a senior in-house staff member. He struggled not to correct misconceptions and would introduce additional information or get overly involved in conversations about potential improvements. In later groups, he decided to take a mock-solemn vow of silence in front of everyone at the start. He agreed to only express his opinions or pick up on points right at the very end. It did the trick, but understandably, when you care about what you do, it’s hard to stay quiet!

A good tip if you’re conducting qualitative research in-house is to equip a colleague who works outside of your team or project group to act as an interviewer or group facilitator. That way, they can genuinely say they’re independent, exhibit reduce bias, and are less likely to get drawn into providing explanations.

How often should you conduct research?

Audience research isn’t something you do just once. If you want to regularly test how well your brand is performing in the market, or track how the public feels about your cause, it’s likely you’ll need external support. Regular panels provider are Kantar, YouGov or Eden Stanley.

There are also many continuous/live audience feedback gathering tools which can be adopted as part of your team’s everyday work, and managed in-house.

Social listening tools allow you to track in real-time what your audiences are saying about you online, and about the issues and campaigns you’re working on. Online analytics allow you to test and refine your content continually, using response data like open and click-through rates, dwell time, engagement and actions. Feedback forms from service users, event attendees and website visitors can all be integrated into your monitoring and evaluation systems. Regular ‘pulse’ surveys of employees, customers or particular user groups can be set up using platforms like SurveyMonkey.

External research support can be invaluable for any organisation that wants to be audience-centred. But being creative on how you develop and use your own staff and systems means you can be selective about when to bring in the experts.

You can contact the author, Sarah Fitzgerald, via LinkedIn.