A Community Has to Let You In

There’s a phrase my dad used to say: poop in, poop out. I think you’re all familiar with it in some form.

It’s true of qualitative research. The quality of your research, and of the campaign that comes out of it, is only as good as the time and effort you put into getting the right number of people in the room, and the exact type of people who fit your audience.

Getting that audience isn’t as simple as finding a list somewhere on the web, throwing some money at it and expecting people to turn up. Deep and meaningful research takes a lot more effort than that.

Three people in the room

When that effort isn’t made, a focus group with young people, for example, can end up with three people in the room. By then you’ve invested the time and the energy, and you’re left with very little data. The insights you do get are going to be weak, and weak insights can steer a campaign in the wrong direction.

There’s also a temptation, when recruiting gets tough, to relax the criteria just to get butts in seats. I think that’s dangerous as well, because you end up not talking to the people you wanted to talk to, and you’re getting data from the wrong people.

What effort looks like

I’ll give you an example. A little while back we worked with Native American young people and their parents in a rural area. The subject was drinking and drug use, and how it shows up in kids’ everyday lives. We were outsiders coming in with some very personal questions, so a list and an incentive were not going to be enough on their own.

We brought in a community expert, a Native American who was embedded in that community. He gave us background and advice, and he really helped us understand the community’s situation. People and organizations operating within the community helped us find participants too. We kept the discussions anonymous and held them online over three days, so people could take part from home.

We still paid people for their time, which certainly helped, but I believe the help we had from inside the community mattered more than the incentive.

What the RIGHT people told us

All of this was for a campaign, and part of the research was testing its ad concepts. One phrase in the ad turned out to be one that this community doesn’t use. Most people didn’t understand it, and it meant nothing to them. I think a phrase like that tells an audience that the people talking to them don’t really get them, which is why we research, to make sure we do. What the agencies learned was that the campaign couldn’t be built on that phrase. If the wrong people had taken part, I don’t think anyone would have raised it.

There’s a lot more to how we do this, and I’ll get into it during our next AGENCY campaign, which starts at the end of October.