Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

I always use some sort of incentive when I hold focus groups - even if I hold them over the phone. The incentive has ranged from $25 gift certificates to Amazon or Barnes and Nobel up to $200 to incent fairly high level executives to attend.

As for location, you may consider going to where your audience is. For example, I've held focus groups at trade shows. I hire screeners to walk the floor and prescreen for the target I need to focus on. If they qualify, they are offered the incentive if they attend the focus group to be held later that day. Obviously, don't give them the incentive unless they show up.

If your audience is a consumer audience doing your focus group on campus or at the mall might be an option. Just make sure you get permission first.

Good luck!

Hi Eric -

A few suggestions:

1) If you are using a formal focus group facility, they should be able to help you - they often have lists of potential participants that are pretty good in quality.
2) The other experts have also given you feedback on the incentive - the facility can help you with that as well, and it might be different for your different consumer types (rider versus non-rider, for example).
3)Check your screener – are you using overly-burdensome criteria to allow people to participate?
4)Sometimes I’ve used an early-bird incentive – an amount over and above the regular incentive given to the first person who shows up for the group.
5)You might want to look into some online methodologies, both live focus groups via the internet or in a bulletin-board style format. I have experience with this and these groups can really help when getting to facility is a problem or in other circumstances. My clients have been very pleased with the results of these groups.

Good luck – feel free to contact me if you have any questions

Eric, to add to the good ideas my colleagues have already given you: Consider telling the potential panelists how the garnered information will benefit them --inform the commuters briefly about the plan to incorporate their comments if you actually will improve the situations people bring up. In my years of commuting to Wall Street there were various forums for us to attend and researchers handed out many surveys for riders to write about transit service, communication and the ride itself. People took the time to write and talk but little was done to address the most voiced problems (which included not hearing announcements because of the poor speaker system).

Good luck.

Corpcommer - MC

Take the focus group to them - in a bus. Wrap a bus in plastic and call it the "survey bus". Bring it to various neighborhoods, park it, and have people come in the to bus to participate. When local outdoor events are happening (parades, shopping malls, races, flea markets, etc.), be there.

The other problem you may have is the feeling that you don't listen, and the group is simply a formality - you'll be doing business as usual anyhow. If you've done groups before, then tell the story of input you got, how things changed, and the upshot.

Have you considered depth interviews or intercepts to achieve your information goals?

Focus groups are good for observation, but for all the effort it takes to get one together, each group still is like an "n" of one. I don't know where your public transit system is located, but I can tell you that in my area, I'd be concerned about the effect of malcontents on group members and the difficulty in managing the group.

If you run it like a campaign, for example, the "Make it Better" movement, you may recruit a variety of users who would be interested in giving you feedback in future efforts as well.

With interviews, you can also get very creative, asking people to tell stories about their best and worst experiences on the system. This can be very rich data in designing improvements that resonate.

To recruit participants among your multiple targets, you could set segment quotas and conduct interviews at key (safe) stations/stops. You also could post flyers in the buses and trains with a description of your effort and a website where people could register to participate. If you have resources available during a certain time period, they could respond to site inquiries by scheduling and conducting telephone interviews.

In fact, the site (or section of your existing site) can house continual updates on the "Make it Better" program. You could effectively build a sample file of opt-in individuals for this and future research efforts, and have a venue for reporting back on changes made based on rider feedback.

Hope this helps

Are you using a professional market researcher? If not, you probably should be. Not only will they help you get better information from your effort and save you money in the process, but they will also know how to solve the recruiting problem.

And, if you use them effectively, they will help you determine if focus groups represent a legitimate solution to your market research needs. Very often they don't, because they are not projectable, and because the quality of the input is largely a function of the skill of the moderator.

Even if you're doing this yourself, you'd be well advised to pay a professional to help you with the planning process (and deal with the recruiting problem). Any fees you pay them for a few hours of their involvement will be worth every dollar.

Let me know if you need a referral.