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Rethinking Research Deliverables

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Kathryn Korostoff of Research Rockstar presented "Rethinking Research Deliverables: So That Your Audience Will Actually Use Them!" at the MRA Annual Conference in Boston. "We have a problem," she said. "Too much research gets ignored or too easily forgotten. The project is successful if people take action or make decisions from the research. If they don't, then the research isn't a success." As for the standard research presentation, Kathryn said, "Sixty minutes of blah blah blah is boring, boring, boring."

Deliverables serve many needs, providing for initial learning, ongoing reference, application and collaboration. To meet all these needs, deliverables need to be engaging and work for diverse learning styles.

Look beyond the common deliverables of slides, written reports, scorecards and online reporting tools and consider new options:

• Blogs are a great tool for sharing preliminary results. You can parcel out conclusions in "on different aspects of the research in bite size pieces". Blogs encourage rich exchanges of results interpretation, facilitating a collaborative analysis process that will often bring in data from other studies and outside resources. "Sometimes staff are almost more interested to see what their colleagues are saying about the research than they are interested in the research itself." You can password protect blogs or specific blog posts to keep confidential data secure.
• Wikis are promising but harder to get traction with. Almost everyone has read a Wikipedia article, but few have edited one. "The problem with a wiki is that nobody wants to be first: the music is playing and you want to dance but no one does. Draft some ambassadors to help get involved posting things." Kathryn's experiments with wikis have had mixed results so far.
• Videos are effective for sharing key results but have to be kept under 20 minutes due to limited attention spans [under 10 minutes if posting on YouTube]. "Videotape the final presentation and make it available on your internal network or post an executive interview on key findings: get executives to say how they plan to use the research. That executive endorsement is huge and carries more import. We can all take a big lesson from YouTube in how we deliver research results."
• Quizzes can transform your quantitative research into something truly engaging. Pew Research packaged its survey results into the "How Millennial are you?" quiz. "This is a great way to help people relate to the data you have collected. If you are doing a segmentation study, why not have an interactive quiz so they can see how the compare?"
• Workshops enable an  interaction of staff and data that helps people digest research results and internalize the results so that they can take action. Workshops can be expensive and time-consuming but can fit with different styles of learning.

"Expose your audience to the research multiple times. Repackage the results with multiple modes: audio podcasts, video podcasts, newsletters, blog posts, a wiki, regional reports, department-specific reports."

Blogs and wikis require moderators who will keep the discussion going and who will quickly answer questions and comments. "It is so easy for people to add comments, and the questions people ask online they often wouldn't ask in real life." If questions aren't resolved quickly, people won't return. With a wiki, people may need technical help as they learn the tool.

"When we talk about social media in market research it's about using social media as a sample source, but how about as a way deliver and socialize research?"

Join Kathryn Korostoff, Cathy Harrison and I tomorrow (Wednesday, June 23) at 2:25 pm ET (GMT-4) as we debate Do It Yourself research, MROCs, social media and customer satisfaction: Unveiling Marketing Research's Future Online.