Idea Spark: How to Reimagine Your Association’s Research

Do you suspect that some of your organization’s research is….well, a tad bit boring? Here are some ideas to make research more interesting, meaningful, and fun!

It’s often difficult to get enough responses. People are busy, and inputting data takes time. Getting people to read the reports is also challenging because some research reports are a compilation of hundreds of dry pages that end up sitting on people’s physical or virtual bookshelves and are rarely thought of. This is too bad because most studies have tons of valuable insights.

Let’s tackle the low response problem.

You might have heard some of these tips: make the survey short, make it meaningful, appeal to their sense of mission, shorten each person’s path with the use of logic, let them know their % completion, offer the final report or access to the benchmark program for free, or compensate respondents.

You might not have heard of this tip:

Turn an event into research, or your research into an event. Not a focus group but an actual live learning event.

During the Member Engagement Labs with Impexium, 478 association leaders shared their insights on everything from new member engagement to volunteer engagement.

We learned which member segments were the most difficult to engage (new members followed by prospective members.)

We learned that members act more extroverted than they feel (and this can make it hard for us to know when they feel uncomfortable.)

We asked, “What worries you most about the future of associations?” (Engagement, AI, retention, and relevance.) And “Is volunteer burnout changing?” (53% said it’s getting worse.) Also, “What are all the ways your association gains awareness?” (1. Content marketing, 2. Word of mouth, 3. Associations own conferences & events 4. Chapters)

And we all (participants included) learned the answers to dozens of other questions.

You can conduct quantitative and qualitative research live during events. Participants enjoy the interactive nature of the event and love learning from their peers. Response rates increase because it doesn’t feel like plowing through a long list of questions alone.

Now, this won’t work for every type of research—likely not studies where you need respondents to look up data to input. But it works for opinion-based research and works well when you need to understand an issue directionally, like trends, how-do-you-do-this, worries/goals, and member needs research.

Events are not the only way. Some associations are tackling the low response problem by releasing member needs research one question at a time, which can be powered by PropFuel. For professional or industry research, some associations use benchmarking platforms like Dynamic Benchmarking to give them immediate access to the data set to compare their metrics against their peers.

Are you seeing those response rates dip? Get creative to get the data you need.