Search

Aiming your campaign at your audience (market research)

What do you know about your volunteers and the people you want to recruit? What newspapers do they read? What TV do they watch? Do they mostly get news and information from the Internet or from their friends? Are they mobile phone users? The more you know about the people you want to reach the more successful your recruitment campaign will be.

Do your own informal research

Research needn’t be time-consuming and expensive. A few informal calls to the right people can arm you with enough ideas and information to feed your imagination and help you target your media work. For example if your target audience (the volunteers you want to recruit) are teenagers, then try and talk to as many young people as you can. Speak to friends’ children; ask if you can visit your local school or sports club. Do as many informal surveys as you can.

Ask your potential volunteers:

  • what radio stations they listen to
  • what magazines/ newspapers/ newsletters they read
  • what websites do they use
  • have they volunteered before or ever been involved with a charity
  • what might persuade them to volunteer

To inform their media strategy Contact the Elderly sent out a printed survey to their current volunteers. They wanted to find out more about their volunteers’ habits and lives. You can read the survey results which have helped the charity to go on to recruit new volunteers.

Online surveys

You can also devise a simple online survey which you can email to potential or current volunteers to find out about their habits, their lives and which media outlets they respond to.

Survey Monkey lets you build your own online survey. The basic survey service is free and will automatically collect responses and analyse the results for you. Other free online survey providers to consider:

What not to do when creating a survey...

  • Try to avoid giving people a "no preference" response to a survey question. They'll always choose it and your survey results won't give you the information you need.
  • Don't give people too many options to choose from when responding to a survey question. It will dilute your final percentages and not give you a clear picture of people's opinions.
  • Don't send out your survey without testing it. Ask people not connected to your work to try it out for you first.
  • Don't ask closed questions if you want people to give you strong qualitative responses.

Here are Joanna Machin from the Institute for Volunteering Research’s top tips for building your own survey:

  • The language and wording you use in your survey should be simple and easy to understand. Avoid the use of jargon and be clear in question instructions (e.g. tick one box only, tick all that apply etc). Test your survey beforehand to make sure that your questions can be fully understood.
  • Provide clear information about why the survey is important (i.e. why they should fill it in), who the survey is for, the deadline for the survey (i.e. what date they should complete it by) and who they should contact if they have any questions or problems. If you are doing an online survey it is useful to include this information in the email you send out.
  • Avoid sending out surveys at times when you think people won’t be available. For example in mid and late December and the height of summer; these are particularly bad times if you are trying to get people to complete surveys while they are at work.
  • It is highly likely that you will need to send out a reminder to encourage more people to complete your survey. Make sure you build in enough time to do this as it will increase your response rate.
  • Always thank respondents on the survey for completing it and if possible offer to send them the findings from the survey or from your project.

Ways to distribute your survey

  • You can build your own list of email addresses from your organisation’s contacts and send the survey to them. Invite your contacts (or offer them an incentive) to send the survey link on to all their friends.
  • You can also post the online survey link (a web address) on other websites, networks and online message boards. For example: Join the online charity communicators’ community on www.askCHARITY.org.uk/messageboard
  • If you want to do a more thorough piece of market research you can purchase target lists of email addresses from brokers.

Be very specific with the broker about who you want to reach with the list you’re buying. For example: “only 20 to 30 year old professionals in the North West of England”. List prices vary in this competitive market. Dudley Jenkins is the largest email list broking firm in the UK. Some others to consider:

Learn more about research


If you want to learn more about putting together your own small-scale social research projects try:

  • “The Good Research Guide” published by Open University Press (£17.99).
  • The British Market Research Bureau also run good not-for-profit research seminars from their London offices which focus on specific research issues - such as Researching Young People, Online Research and Researching Sensitive Issues. Each seminar costs £50 + vat and lasts half a day.

Commissioning and buying research


Commercial companies have for many years been building up detailed profiles of potential consumers and their opinions. Many charities are now using this market research to inform their campaigns, media work, volunteer recruitment, fundraising and marketing strategies. Have a look at ACORN who analyse the UK population's habits and create "consumer classification" reports.

Here is some basic, free information available about demographic classifications used in consumer research: www.businessballs.com/demographicsclassifications.htm

You can purchase the latest consumer behaviour research from the Henley Centre (including an ongoing study which monitors the lifestyles and attitudes of older (45+) consumers)

www.dubit.biz is a market research company which specialise in understanding young people and was involved in the recent Home Office Generation V research.

You can commission your own research. See how the Samaritans commissioned research from Tickbox.net for their volunteering campaign and the costs involved. The British Heart Foundation also used research to generate editorial coverage for their recruitment campaign.  

The Research Buyer's Guide has a free online directory. The Market Research Society also have a beginner’s guide to choosing a market research agency. For more information about working with outside agencies see the article on Hiring Help. 

Use other people’s research for free

Here is a collection of relevant research reports available free online:

 

Read the next article in this section.... Getting your whole organisation on board