Corona takes many items into consideration when designing a research plan for our clients. In short, market research includes asking the right people, the right questions, in the right manner, and then conducting the right analyses. Here are a few of the considerations when conducting research with your membership.

Research mode

• What type of contact information do you have for members? And how are they used to interacting with you? For many, this will be email, but it may also include phone, mail, or even in-person research at conferences. The goal is to select the mode(s) that will reach all, or at least the greatest number of members possible.
• Quant vs. qual? Are you trying to measure opinions (quant) or do exploratory research or dig deeper into an issue (qual)?
• Do you need multiple touch points? Announcements, invites, and reminders? Online with telephone or mail reminders?

Goals

• What are your goals and expected outcomes? It’s often easy to jump into start writing survey questions or qualitative prompts. It’s often harder to think of bigger picture goals and how you will use the information you gain. Start with your goals to ensure the research will turn out successful.

Sampling

• Sample all or some? For large organizations, you may not need to survey every member to have valid, representative results. You may want to give everyone an opportunity to respond or you may decide to only survey a random selection to minimize the number of members contacted.
• Can you append data for actual behavior? While you can always ask about their membership behavior (e.g., length of membership, conferences attended, etc.), if you have that information already, you can just append it to their results. This will yield more accurate results and require fewer questions asked to respondents.

Frequency

• How often should you conduct member research? Annual research makes the most sense for some organizations, while others may go years between efforts. There is no right answer, but in general, regular intervals make the most sense, and you will want to take into consideration the rate of change within the organization. If membership turns over regularly, or you’re in a fast-paced industry, more frequent research may be needed to keep the pulse of members.

Incentives

• Do we offer an incentive? Generally speaking, an incentive will increase response rate. Furthermore, through our own testing, Corona has seen that the make-up of respondents includes a broader mix of people when an incentive is offered. Incentives serve to both encourage response and recognize their time and effort in completing the survey.
• What type of incentive? While there are many options, the incentive should have broad appeal as to not skew the results by being over appealing to one segment and not at all appealing to another. Prize drawings, small token gift cards, and/or additional member benefits are all common options.

What other questions or concerns have you had about conducting research with your members?

So far in this series on membership organizations, we’ve discussed communications, segmenting, and the importance of personal benefits. Here we combine the latter two and look at how perceptions of benefits change over time. The reasons someone may join fresh out of college or at the start of a new career is different than someone who continues to be a member as they near retirement.

This, in fact, is another benefit of segmenting your membership, both in practice and in evaluating results from any membership research. By looking at how results vary by age, time in the industry or their career, and/or time as a member, you can tailor services and messaging to each group.

For example, we’ve seen such differences as:

• Resource access
• Skill development
• Career development
• Broader industry efforts

Even if your organization is more homogeneous, such as a young professionals group, understanding where they are at will help you ensure the organization remains relevant to them.

What other factors have you seen vary by member tenure?