Nonprofit Planning, Marketing, Fundraising, and Search.	FAQ Home Read Published Articles
Intro	Services	Clients	Results

Constituency Research
By Claudia Chouinard

With constituency-based income more important today than ever before, research can be a primary means of zeroing in on the crucial issues your campaigns and mailings must address to win and keep constituents.

Research can provide clear and compelling answers to sophisticated questions of packaging, pricing, and – most important – positioning. In today’s crowded marketplace, research helps not-for-profit organizations direct limited resources, enabling them to say the right things to the right people at the right time.

When mass methods give way to personalized and highly targeted appeals, in-depth data are often most relevant. Rather than appealing to all prospects, you need to focus on the specific prospects whose objections and misunderstandings can make or break your campaigns.  

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research

Two types of research are possible:

• Quantitative research focuses on data you can total or tabulate. Typical questions include: How many consumers do we reach? Where do they live, how well educated are they, what are their jobs, what do they earn, what do they read?
• Qualitative research emphasizes quality of data over quantity, taking smaller samplings of particular constituent groups and discussing their perceptions in depth.

Quantitative research provides a vital snapshot of your constituency and your marketplace. Many needed facts and demographics may be culled directly from your existing data base, while the balance may be gathered using paper survey techniques. Most not-for-profit organizations have some form of quantitative research on hand.

Such research will very likely define the vast majority of your supporters as affluent, well-educated, active individuals over age 35. Yet such consumers are everyone’s target today; in the competitive marketplace, this information is only a beginning.

Only qualitative research can provide answers to the most challenging question about your constituents: Why do they act as they do?

Success in today’s marketplace demands matching quantifiable characteristics with more in-depth knowledge of what makes your cause worthy to your particular constituents. Clear patterns of experience and opinion emerge from even a small sampling. As few as 15 interviews of a small target group can produce the same objections, the same comments again and again. Fixing these items can often produce immediate and positive results for your program.

In the not-for-profit marketplace, consumers purchase intangible products. A ticket, a membership, a gift - these are only avenues to the strong relationship that consumers seek to have with your organization. 

Changing Your Perceptions

Qualitative research focuses on the quality of the relationship between you and your constituents, as perceived by the constituents. Your perceptions as an organization insider are always quite different from those held by your constituents. Qualitative research is one of the few ways you can begin to understand how you look from the outside.

You likely have a particular set of prospects who won’t buy, give, renew, participate, or upgrade in the way you and your organization want them to. Qualitative research helps you understand the specific objections and roadblocks that your particular consumers perceive as impediments to the behavior you want to encourage.

Once these factors are understood, your job of deciding where and how to deploy limited resources toward the best constituency prospects becomes easier. Your decisions become strategic, not chance, and your prospects become selective, not random.

Gathering such small-quantity, high-quality constituency data is done in several ways. The most complete answers can be obtained from face-to-face contact in a focus group, a professionally led discussion session of 6 to 14 randomly selected members of a particular constituency. Ninety-minute sessions that provide participants with complete anonymity usually provide a wealth of information. When a focus group is not feasible, excellent results can be obtained in carefully structured telephone interviews that cover a series of specific questions.

If a portion of each focus group discussion and each telephone interview is devoted to gathering demographics, qualitative research presents a more complete picture of the target group under study. If results from a paper survey are available, participants from the smaller subgroup can be compared and contrasted with constituents as a whole. This practice is often helpful in discovering key differences that distinguish these prospects from less qualified names in your prospect pool. Overall, even fragmented data can help those who stay in close touch with relevant constituents make more informed decisions.

You can and should be in direct contact with your constituents and invite their feedback as frequently as possible. However, research is time and labor intensive, and your constituents may shy away from delivering negative comments directly to you.

Outside research is an effective means of getting top leadership or board members more involved in solving pressing constituency issues, of which staff are often well aware. Direct verbatim comments often clear away internal roadblocks and encourage a service orientation that may previously have been viewed as too expensive, too labor intensive, or too risky for the organization.

Many organizations are tempted to delay research until results are off and support is dropping. Such a situation develops gradually and often requires years to repair. Not-for-profits are well advised to get in touch – and stay in touch – with constituents well before such problems develop. Research can help strengthen the relationships you depend on to survive and prosper.

We invite you to email comments to get@resultsg.com

This site is designed and maintained by .dX. Consulting, Inc.