Resources
World Cafés
The term, "World Café" was coined by Juanita Brown in her doctoral dissertation. Basically, it is simply an easy-to-use method for creating collaborative dialogue around a series of real-life questions in an organization or community. The purpose of these sessions is to access collective intelligence, build new knowledge, and bring forth desired futures.
Since its inception as a new way of creating dialog, the World Café has been used by hundreds of groups, including large multinational corporations, small non-profits, government offices, community-based organizations, and educational institutions, following a set of design principles. See the principles.
I have used World Cafés in my work with Supply Chain Operations (SCO), a division of Unisys Corporation. I would be happy to discuss how this process can be used in your organization as part of your planning process. Contact me for more information.
Online Surveys
Before the Internet, surveys could only be conducted one of three ways - phone, mail, or intercept. All had (and still have) their advantages and disadvantages. With the advent of online tools, like SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang, conducting research became easier, particularly for some populations. For younger respondents, and business-to-business participants, Web-based surveys can be ideal.
Quirk's Marketing Research Review recently published an interesting article about how the American Cancer Society conducted "research" on research. In essence, the ACS was preparing to launch a volunteer satisfaction tracking study and wanted to know which method - mail or Web - would produce the best rate of response, which method would participants prefer when given the choice, and to what degree are behaviors and opinions the same or different depending on the method? If you want to find out what the ACS learned, click here, and enter article ID 20090203 when prompted.
Want to talk about an upcoming survey? Contact me.
Online Discussion Boards
Focus groups are a terrific way to gather qualitative data from customers, potential customers, employees, and other types of audiences. While results are not projectible to the population (e.g. you cannot say that because 5 of 10 people in a focus group like your new product that 50% of the entire population will), they can be extremely useful in generating hypotheses, developing ad concepts or copy, and understanding how respondents solve problems.
In-person focus groups, though, can have logistical challenges. Getting the right 10 people into a room at the same time can be complicated. So, while I still moderate focus groups the traditional way, I have also been using online discussion boards, like Quick Topic, with success.
To learn more about this emerging technique and how I can help you with your qualitative research needs, contact me.