When considering “connection” in market research, there are several prominent links we focus on establishing and nurturing. Often the most commonly discussed, we refer to connecting businesses and stakeholders to customers to enable more grounded, customer-centric decision making. A significant factor in achieving this is connecting stakeholders to the insights being provided to enhance their application in business thinking and culture. We often consider the connections necessary to achieving customer centricity in B2B and B2C relationships, but it is easy to overlook how this translates to third sector organisations, particularly charitable organisations.
Parallel to commercial research, connection plays a critical role in enhancing relationships between charitable organisations and their stakeholders. However, third sector research also carries the responsibility of connecting these organisations not to customers, but to the communities they serve, who represent a wide demographic with often unique and dynamic needs. It is vital that insights encourage a mutual understanding amongst donors, board members, employees and volunteers of the people utilising the organisation’s services. This understanding is a crucial building block that supports charitable organisations shaping the future of their services to best meet their community’s needs.
With charitable services usually being maintained solely through fundraising and donations, budgets for insights are understandably tighter than in public and private services. This means when research is conducted on behalf of these organisations, the insights must work harder to provide decision makers with vital information for their operations to be at their most effective and impactful. Therefore, when designing research for charitable organisations, we must consider what types of data will be most impactful and memorable, to hold influence upon decision making.
With many third sector organisations being oriented around offering crucial services to people requiring support, whether on a short or long-term basis, charitable service provision is often focused on improving quality of life. Achieving this often requires complex decision making, for example, using information on service users’ needs and preferences to determine budgetary and workforce allocations. This renders service users lived experiences an invaluably rich data type to be collected and reported back to key decision makers, especially as there are often several operational layers between the two. By presenting self-reported stories from service users to charitable organisations, an opportunity is created to connect decision makers with authentic, raw experiences of the people they aim to support and whose lives their decisions will impact.
The power of receiving this kind of insight alongside statistics is significantly more impactful on decision making within the organisation than the presentation of numerical data alone. Hearing lived experiences humanises our understanding of complex issues and need sets by conveying the unfiltered emotions and opinions of real people. Opening a window between decision makers in charitable organisations and the end users will subsequently lead to more effective services and systems on offer.
Not only is this applicable to resource allocation within charitable organisations, but can also be relevant to resource generation. Known as the Identifiable Victim Effect in psychology, humans have a greater inclination to experience empathy for and offer greater support to an identifiable individual in need, opposed to a need being presented as a faceless statistic (Genevsky et al., 2013). Collating lived experiences of those a charitable organisation supports can connect potential donors to their stories and has been proven to positively impact the volume and size of donations made.
Within the market research industry, another key element to connection that is often discussed is the importance of closing the feedback loop. Typically, we consider this from a “you say, we did” perspective to report actions taken off the back of insights generation. Whilst businesses have the ability to monitor the impact of their decision making via statistical data on sales, footfall or online traffic, charitable organisations offering personal services cannot generate this kind of data. However, having an ongoing temperature gauge on how their services are being received is often crucial to the wellbeing of a community.
Offering a regular opportunity to provide feedback on charitable services can connect those who are directly involved in their delivery with the service’s users by nurturing a greater mutual understanding and a sense of cohesion in achieving the goals of the service. Whilst they inherently come with associated risks and challenges, there are steps that can be taken to reduce this. For example, for many charitable organisations, a trauma informed approach being utilised in the listening sessions would significantly impact the quality of information that is collected, whilst ensuring no harm is caused to those who offer to share their feedback. Offering feedback opportunities via different channels including text-based communications can negate concerns around anonymity and accessibility and expand the range of service users feedback is received from, which allows data to be collected from a broader perspective.
A structured listening channel program allows charitable organisations to generate data that can populate a scorecard style dashboard of results, which can significantly reduce analysis time whilst providing straight-forward metrics for both long-term monitoring and goal setting. As a strong starting point, a quantitative survey can generate metrics such as ease of accessibility of services, i.e., speed, communication and location; impact of services, i.e., progress towards desired outcomes; service reach, i.e., demographics of service users and engagement rates. These metrics can be monitored alongside internal data such as financial outgoings for different services to allow charitable organisations to streamline decision making on resource allocation and service adaptation.
A strong connection between those receiving services and those responsible for delivering them can shift services from being doing to, to being doing with; a mentality that can greatly improve service impact and efficacy. For this connection to be worthwhile, service users must perceive their involvement to be meaningful and not just symbolic. Therefore, closing the feedback loop and informing users on how their feedback has been used is crucial and must be included in the processes surrounding the listening channels.
Creating opportunities to connect the often complex web of those involved in delivering and receiving services from charitable organisations can significantly improve a services efficacy, efficiency and impact. Whilst the missions of third sector organisations are often unique they are usually aligned on their overarching aim of having a positive impact on the livelihood of the people they interact with; something that is impossible to achieve without connection.