Before making your marketing plans you need to assess your previous, current and potential customers and stakeholders – whoever they may be. What do they think and feel about your organisation and what you offer? What are their needs, wants and aspirations?

Those of you supporting frontline charities will have a good idea of what these needs may be. But as any good researcher will tell you, never confuse what you think the market needs with what it actually wants. Otherwise, you’ll always be basing your work on guesswork and hunches, rather than empirical evidence.

Broadly speaking there are two types of marketing research - qualitative and quantative.

Qualitative:

It could be a focus group. It could be a one-on-one with a volunteer, donor, advertiser or in fact someone who has no relation to you whatsoever. Qualitative research is about dialogue and obtaining rich and detailed information from a relatively small group of people – the results of which feed into your marketing strategy.

Quantative:

This is more about ‘mass research’ and gathering information and statistics that show clear patterns and trends, which again, can shape a marketing strategy. Generally speaking, this is a cheaper way of getting feedback. For example, online surveys are a cheap and easy way of getting instant answers to simple questions.
 

Do it yourself?

The good news is that even if you’re a tiny organisation, there is no reason why you can’t conduct both types of research yourself – through website, newsletters, email, traditional letters and, probably more effectively than any of them, over a coffee.

Online survey companies like surveyshack.com and surveymonkey.com you can now send professional surveys to a mass audience for next to nothing.

Here’s an example of a sample donor survey

Here’s a PDF of a case study of how Oxfam used online surveys to improve its marketing

As with many aspects of marketing, research is often just simple common sense and is about asking the right questions, in the right way, in the correct order.


Tips for writing a marketing research survey

1. Decide what information you want to gather from the survey. How will you use the information? This is important because you want to make collating the results as simple as possible.
    
2. Structure the survey so that questions follow a logical order. Before you ask a respondent how much they can afford to donate first ask if they already donate.
    
3. Keep questions, sentences and words short, succinct and easy to understand.
    
4. Avoid asking ‘open’ questions that readers can easily evade or ignore. Multiple choice questions are a great way of guiding the respondent to provide a response that you can feed into a marketing plan.
    
5. You could employ a ratings scale asking respondents to mark their responses out of five. Keep this consistent.
    
6. Test-drive the survey on a handful of trusted people before its mass distribution. Gather feedback and fine-tune the research so that it gives you the information you need.