Grow your audiences using these market research techniques
A guest post from Amanda Lester
For arts administrators and boards who have little experience with it, market research can seem daunting, expensive, and a superfluous drain on resources. But the truth is, market research can be simple, accessible, and incredibly valuable—and it is within reach of nonprofit arts organizations, no matter how small your staff or budget. All you have to do is ask the right questions of the right people and then listen.
Yes, it’s that simple.
For organizations of any size, market research is a valuable investment. But it may be even more important for smaller organizations to do market research, so that they can work as strategically and efficiently as possible to grow their audiences with the resources they have.
Beyond A/B testing and post-event surveys, which are now commonplace, let's look at some ways nonprofit arts organizations of any size can do market research regularly, consistently, and with minimal resources.
This isn't a comprehensive list; it's designed to prompt new ways of thinking and may spark even more ideas for you and your arts organization.
1. Collaborate
While there are some trade-offs to using creative methods and limited resources to execute market research, that shouldn't stop nonprofit arts organizations from making market research a consistent part of their work.
The best way to avoid common pitfalls—such as biased approach and analysis, ineffective questioning, using a non-representative sample, etc.—is to partner with an experienced, external researcher. Someone who isn't entrenched in your organization's everyday work will see things you can’t.
Even if hiring an expert doesn't sound feasible, don't be afraid to ask for help.
Some market research agencies are open to providing discounted services or working pro-bono on all or part of a project for nonprofits.
Other experienced researchers may be willing to share advice or guidance for less than if they were tasked with completing the entire project.
Consider asking your corporate or educational partners if they could provide in-kind support.
Think about which of your community partners might be interested in collaborating on a project in which you share similar research questions or complementary objectives.
2. Mine your existing data
Think about all those customer service emails, social media comments, phone messages, chat logs, online reviews, and sales and donation records your organization has, whether in a database or still in file cabinets. This is data that can be regularly mined for marketing and fundraising insights. And the best part is, you're already collecting it!
When analyzing existing data, you’ll want to start with a question or hypothesis and leave your assumptions behind. Here's what that process looks like:
Question: What are some of the most common pain points for my customers?
Randomly select a sample of customer service emails from the most recent season.
Apply a label to each email for every issue mentioned (this is "coding" qualitative data).
An easy way to do this is in Excel or GoogleSheets, where the email text is in column A and each new label has its own column starting with column B. Then you can easily mark which labels apply to each email (like with a "1" in the corresponding cell). Emails can contain multiple issues, so an email could be assigned multiple labels.
It's okay to start with a working list of labels based on the issues you think are common, but be prepared to add to or edit your list.
Organize the labels into larger categories (these are often called "themes").
Identify which themes and labels occur most often.
Summarize your findings by listing the top themes, 2-3 quotes from the customer service emails that you feel best represent each theme, and any other high-level observations or insights supported by the data.
Consider follow-up research questions, which may require more data mining or using other research methods:
Are my customers’ most common pain points consistent or different from other data sources like phone calls or online chats?
How have my customers' pain points changed over the past few years?
Which pain points were most common among my now-lapsed customers?
How could these pain points be alleviated?
3. Recruit beyond mass emails to ticket buyers
Nonprofits have one advantage over for-profit companies when it comes to recruiting participants for market research: Many customers, high-potentials, and even avoiders and rejectors may feel more of an intrinsic motivation to help a nonprofit better serve their community.
And arts organizations don't have to rely solely on mass emails or professional recruiting services to find people willing to share their thoughts. Here are some alternatives to explore:
Consider reaching out to the communities who engage with your organization in different ways, such as volunteers, nonprofit partner organizations, young professionals, college students, and donors. Partner with your colleagues to determine who would be best to speak with based on your research objectives.
Use social media to recruit quickly and inexpensively. A simple social media post directing to a survey can help you recruit loyal audiences. To find high potentials, avoiders, and rejectors, consider a boosted post, targeted ad, or even a strategically-selected influencer partnership.
Try adding a pop-up survey (or pop-up directing to a survey) on your website. If you go this route, make sure to keep your survey very short and turn it off when you have a sufficient number of responses collected, so you don't negatively affect your website user experience.
As a last resort, try snowball sampling, where you ask research participants, friends, family, or colleagues to help you identify other potential recruits.
In all of these cases, it's imperative that you share with potential respondents why you are doing the research and how it will benefit them or their community.
Note: If people express interest in participating, but you've already recruited enough participants for a project, you should prioritize keeping your sample size appropriate and manageable. However, for nonprofits especially, it's important to never discourage sharing feedback or turn people away entirely. Politely let them know you've reached your max number of participants for this project and offer them another way to share their thoughts.
4. Get qualitative
Qualitative research usually involves smaller samples and tends to be more time-intensive and expensive than quantitative research. Nevertheless, qualitative research is crucial to understanding the "why" behind surface-level insights.
To get the most out of your qualitative research, hire an experienced moderator. But here are some other ways for nonprofit arts organizations to reduce costs and increase efficiency:
In-person: If you're dead set on holding in-person interviews or focus groups and you don't have the budget to rent a facility, consider using a conference room in your office or a small rehearsal space or green room in your performance venue. You can keep it formal and business-like or host a more casual gathering.
Keep in mind, though, that these choices may impact the quality of your data. For example, market researchers normally hold in-person interviews and focus groups in a neutral place, rather than at the client's facility, where the participants can be influenced or intimidated by the interview location.
Online interview platforms: A complex, expensive interview platform isn't necessary! In fact, many market research agencies use Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and similar programs to conduct research, partly to keep costs down and partly because participants are already familiar, meaning there's less room for tech issues and user error.
Partner with an experienced market researcher to learn best practices, tips, and tricks for conducting research over Zoom and the like, such as which settings to use and how to manage an online version of the traditional client "backroom" for unobtrusive observation.
Mobile diaries: Need more flexibility? Mobile diaries are an "asynchronous" qualitative market research method typically carried out over the course of a few days to a week. Participants answer questions in their own time. There are a number of research-related advantages to mobile diary studies, but perhaps most importantly for nonprofits, there are low-cost, efficient tools that can be leveraged to collect this type of audience feedback.
Once you have recruited your research participants, there are a myriad of free and low-cost programs that allow you to schedule SMS texts and WhatsApp messages. This gives you the ability to prepare questions and prompts to send to participants at specific times during the fielding period. Your participants respond to you after each question or prompt using text, emojis, photos, or videos. Follow up with probing questions as needed on each text or WhatsApp chain.
Online community: Another qualitative research method is to recruit participants for an online community, which is often active over the long-term and allows for group discussion. While you can set up an online community for a single project, it's time-intensive enough that it would be more efficient to use over multiple projects (such as over the course of a season or year) which is what many for-profit companies do.
There are multiple free and low-cost options that nonprofits can use to mimic expensive research platforms. For example, you could set up a private Facebook group, and once you have screened participants to make sure they match the criteria for the research you expect to do, invite them to join the group. When you have a new research project, post questions or prompts in your Facebook group, which is already pre-screened and opted-in. Refresh your online community as needed, cycling out long-time participants and bringing in new participants. Alternatives to a Facebook group? Discord or Slack.
5. Be creative with incentives
There's a mantra in market research: Respect the respondent.
Research participants are giving you their time and opinions, so it's only fair that you give them something in return. Incentives (aka thank-you gifts aka rewards for participation) are extremely important, not only for showing respect, but also for securing high quality-participants, recruiting quickly, and getting high show rates or response rates.
The problem is that incentives make up a huge portion of the costs in market research projects, often close to 50%. For nonprofit arts organizations with smaller budgets, the research still must happen and the participants still must be rewarded, so something has to give.
Nonprofits have two things going for them:
Intrinsic motivation: As mentioned earlier, many people will feel an intrinsic motivation to help a nonprofit organization better serve their community. While this usually isn't incentive enough by itself, it's still helpful to be transparent about how participants' feedback will benefit your organization's mission, programs, and impact.
Why? You'll get more thoughtful, constructive feedback, and your participants may feel more engaged with your organization as a whole. It can also help offset a more frugal approach to extrinsic incentives (e.g., cash or gift cards).
Alternatives to cash incentives: Market researchers normally use cash or cash equivalents as incentives to avoid introducing bias into the recruit, since cash appeals to everyone. Nonprofit arts organizations with smaller budgets may not be able to offer sufficient cash incentives, but don't worry! You may have other options at your disposal.
Consider offering a pair of comp tickets to an upcoming event of their choice from a list you provide. Another option might be a gift certificate or discount code to be used on tickets, merch, or food at your venue. You might ask a corporate or community partner to donate something that would appeal to as many potential participants as possible, including your avoiders and rejectors. Or give participants the option to donate their reward back to your organization to support a program of their choice. That last one might sound far-fetched, but I've actually had participants reach out to ask if they could donate their cash incentive to the non-profit client.
Sweepstakes can be cost-effective, but remember that as an incentive, it's far less compelling than a guaranteed reward, so the prize should be extra special and your expectations for the response rate realistic. If you're based in a state that has laws around sweepstakes, make sure that you're following the rules, which may include listing terms and conditions and providing alternatives to enter the drawing.
6. Put yourself in another person's shoes
When you're trying to understand your audience and their experience with your organization, there's nothing like putting yourself in their shoes. Ideally, you would partner with an experienced, external researcher and use ethnographic methods with recruited participants who fit specific criteria based on your research objectives.
But there are lower-budget, less time-intensive options that nonprofit arts organizations can consider. The key is to observe the experience you're interested in understanding better without using or sharing any of the special perks you have or tips and tricks you know about as an arts administrator.
If your objective is to understand the audience experience, for example, pretend you are a typical audience member. As part of this research, you might: explore your organization's events online; call the Box Office for assistance; purchase tickets; drive and park or take public transit or rideshare to the venue; sit in the nosebleeds; take in the event itself; line up for drinks or the facilities at intermission; exit the venue with the crowd; sit in traffic on your way home; etc.
Observe where you hit obstacles or pain points, observe how you overcome any issues, observe any moments of delight or satisfaction, and observe how you feel as you go through the process. Take notes and share with your colleagues later. Alternatively, ask a friend or family member to act as a mystery shopper/patron and have them take notes on their experience.
If your objective is to understand the customer service experience, shadow a customer-facing representative for a couple of hours, a half-day, or a day (whatever you can manage) and a few separate times with different representatives in various roles, if you can. Ask the colleague you're shadowing to briefly explain to each customer why you are observing.
Observe what issues customers inquire about most often, observe the process by which issues are resolved, observe how the customer and your colleague react at each step in the process, and observe if there are particular pain points or moments of delight or satisfaction. Take notes and share with your colleagues later.
Alternatively, take on the role of a customer-facing representative for a couple of hours to experience first-hand what issues customers inquire about and the resolution process. The benefit of this approach is that when you're put on the spot, you may come up with new and creative ways to improve the process and the customer experience. You may also develop more empathy for your colleagues and your customers. I call that a win-win!
Remember that market research is not just another expense; it's an investment. Why? What you learn will help focus your time, energy, creativity, and other resources toward the most strategic path(s) forward. But you're also engaging with your audience and community in the process, showing your organization's willingness to listen and adapt to their needs.
Do you have other ideas for bringing market research within reach? Share below in the comments. I would love to hear other tips or strategies that could help organizations of all sizes better understand their audiences.
Questions? Reach out to me on LinkedIn or email me at amandalester@soundingpoint.la
