Working With Us
Our Process
Our goal is to make research easy for your agency and for your clients. You don’t need to know a lot about research to work with us, and you don’t even need to know exactly what you want to ask or how to ask it. That’s our job.
Whether you’re pursuing a thought leadership study for your agency, or an audience research initiative for a client, the fundamental process is the same. You can download a Project Roadmap for the detail, but here’s the gist.
Kickoff Workshop
Every project we do starts with a workshop to discuss your goals, your thoughts, and your questions.
For thought leadership research, we’ll explore your agency’s niche, your point of view, the prospects you’re hoping to reach, and the assumptions, ideas, and trends you want to be able to discuss in your thought leadership efforts. It’s okay if you aren’t sure what or who to ask — we can help guide you to find a study topic that will be unique, helpful to your audience and effective in your thought leadership efforts.
For client research, you and your client will share your goals, the specific topics you’re interested in exploring, and questions you have about what motivates buyers, their preferences, their experience with competitors, and where they look for information and advice. We will guide you through this discussion so you and your client don’t need to prepare anything in advance.
Survey Development
Based on our workshop discussions, we develop the first draft of survey questions and answer options in a Google Doc and share it with you.
You and your team add comments, questions, and ideas, and we finalize the survey content for your approval.
Then we build the online survey, incorporating screening, logic, piping, and other tools to ensure your respondents have a great experience while we’re gathering their feedback. We carefully test the survey to ensure everything works as it should.
You and your team review and test the online survey and approve it.
Fielding
You have a number of options for fielding your survey to get the responses you need. Depending on your audience and your topic, you may utilize any of the following respondent sources. Regardless of the mix of respondent sourcing options we utilize for your study, we can help you with invitation copy and examples, introductory communications for prospective partners, and panel coordination.
Client Fielding
You or your client sends out invitations to your own database of clients and prospects. We provide different survey links based on their target groups, so we can analyze similarities and differences between the groups in the survey results. You may also choose to share invitations with their social media communities.
You and your clients can source unlimited respondents from your own invitations.
Partner Fielding
You or your client identifies organizations who have access to the respondents you need and are willing to distribute survey invitations to their contacts on your behalf.
Because the survey is anonymous, potential partners don’t need to fear that respondents’ contact information will be used to pester them with sales pitches after they participate. And we don’t need their email lists, because they’re sending out the invitations themselves.
Partners can be given early access to the study results, custom webinars showing them the insights from their respondents compared to those of other participants, and even their own custom data visualization to explore.
There is no limit to the number of partners you can engage, and no limit to the number of responses you can secure through partners. And we’ve seen agencies build great relationships with these partners and even gain them as clients!
Panel Fielding
If you don’t have access to your ideal respondents, or you don’t have enough of them to provide the number of responses needed, we can help you source respondents through our panel providers.
These organizations recruit and maintain large groups of respondents willing to participate in survey research. They maintain detailed information on their profiles and incentivize them to participate.
We identify the respondents you want and incorporate screening and data quality measures into a special version of the survey for the panel provider to distribute to the target respondent group. You pay a per-respondent fee for the responses we choose to keep.
Analysis and Visualization
Once responses have been collected, we begin analysis of the data.
First, we apply strict data quality measures to ensure that the data we’re analyzing is reliable. We remove those that were answered too quickly (speeding) and those that demonstrate the respondent wasn’t really answering the questions (patterning, straightlining, etc.) We also utilize special software to identify those who have been identified as repetitive low-quality respondents or bots and remove them from the data set.
Our proprietary segmentation analysis organically identifies groups within the respondent population who share beliefs about unique sets of attitudes, making them different from other survey participants. We also analyze data reliability so you can clearly identify where there are significant differences in responses between various groups in the survey.
Finally, the survey results are developed into a custom interactive data visualization that allows you to explore and compare the results on your own.
Results Workshops
With the analysis completed and the visualization built, we conduct a results workshop with you and your team. We review your custom audience segments in depth and explore responses to every other question in the survey. We help you see key differences between groups, as well as topics on which responses generally agree regardless of segment. We help you explore responses between different demographic groups, different behaviors, and different challenges and preferences.
Because we have over 30 years of experience in marketing strategy, we can share strategic implications of the results, and discuss potential considerations for marketing and communication strategies.
The goal of the workshop is to leave you and your team feeling confident about the overall findings, as well as understanding how to explore the data for additional insights as you see fit.
If we are conducting a project for one of your clients, we conduct a second workshop with you and your client after the agency workshop.
Post-Research Resources
Once your research is complete we prepare a variety of deliverables:
- Interactive visualization of results
- List of research volunteers
- Self-segmentation questionnaire
- Open-ended responses (uncategorized)
- Anonymized data set, if desired
If your research is designed for thought leadership, we also provide:
- List of key topics from the research
- Executive Summary draft
- Public-facing interactive visualization you can embed on your website
- Recorded public webinar presentation with your team
- Assistance with writeups for conference speaking opportunities
Pricing
Our flat project pricing makes it easy to budget, whether it’s for your agency’s annual thought leadership research or for client projects. You’ll pay a flat fee for the research development, execution, analysis, visualization, and post-research content elements. You’ll also pay a per-respondent fee if you are using a panel provider to source respondents, and additional fees if you choose to utilize one of our Research Activation programs.
Because we work in partnership with agencies who incorporate our research into their work for clients, we don’t list our pricing publicly. However, in a short phone call or email exchange, we can provide agency professionals with precise information about how much we charge for the research you’re considering.
No sales pitch. No drawn-out presentation. Just answer a few questions, and we’ll tell you your cost. Easy peasy.
