Experiments with Engaging Research Data Collection

What counts as research?

The first thing that might come to mind is a statistically significant quantitative survey. Dig deeper, and you might think of focus groups.

In my old consumer marketing days at Crayola, point-of-sale data was considered just as valid as any other research type, and interestingly, it’s research where the “respondents” don’t even know it is happening.

There are some benefits to research that respondents are unaware of. This method can reduce research bias, as respondents might be biased by knowing they are participating in research. Also, the usual types of research take valuable time, so it might be challenging to get enough respondents or a representative sample of the right kind of respondents.  

All these problems with research have been bothering me, especially the recruitment issue.

Last year, I partnered with the fabulous marketing team at Impexium to bring three Member Engagement Labs to the association industry. 478 association leaders signed on to participate in these problem-solving programs. As soon as we launched the Labs, the number of registrants grew daily, and I thought, “Huh, we’re going to have many people in the Labs—enough that we’ll see patterns in the data!”

The Labs became not just an experiment in virtual learning and collaboration but also a research experiment. The Labs helped me test my theory that events can be used to capture meaningful research insights.

In between keynotes, I crunched that data (there sure was a lot of fantastic data) and wrote a massive report. When I delivered the enormous report to the Impexium team, they said, “Whooaaa! This is quite a large report!” Then they asked, “How would you feel about dividing it into three reports?”

We are publishing the first of those three reports!

I invite you to join 478 outstanding association professionals, Impexium, and me as we revisit the Member Engagement Lab journey.

Book 1 focuses on early engagement: attracting potential members and engaging new members.

Dive in and see:

• 13 ways associations attract new members, in rank order

• 10 member segments and how difficult they are to engage

• What worries association leaders most about engaging new members

You’ll learn tons of details, such as how your peers leverage email with these two critical segments, not to mention word of mouth.

So download this report, dig in, and start thinking about member engagement in a new way!