New ‘Forum with Friends’ Enables Co-ops to Partner in Qualitative Research Efforts
Online focus groups, a qualitative research offering of Cooperative Insights, are helping electric cooperatives gain deeper understanding of members’ beliefs, opinions and motivations through moderated online panel discussions.
Now, your cooperative can take advantage of a new service – Forum with Friends – powered by the principle of “cooperation among cooperatives.”
Forum with Friends enables 2-3 cooperatives to work together to gather feedback from members on emerging trends and topics impacting cooperative business strategy. Topics offered this year include:
- Home solar interest and perceptions
- Communications preferences, including about outages
- Tech such as smart devices and EVs
- Young member perceptions
- New member onboarding, understanding of being a “member” and the cooperative difference
A total of 75 members can participate, providing cooperatives with a wide range of opinions from a diverse cross-section of members. Co-ops will receive an in-depth report of responses, including an executive summary and results of survey activities and discussion topics.
Like traditional online focus groups, these online community forums place invited members together in a moderated online platform, enabling them to interact with each other and the survey materials. Your cooperative can monitor the conversations, which occur organically – almost as if a traditional focus group were occurring on a social networking site.
A Forum with Friends is open to respondents for one week, so members can participate when it’s convenient for them. Because the survey questions are pre-determined, the turnaround time for cooperatives to receive their detailed reports is fast – less than 4 weeks in most cases.
Prefer to host a Forum of only your co-op’s members? Electric cooperatives nationwide are using online focus groups to develop effective communications and marketing materials, assess takeaways from videos and other communications pieces, gain insights into member understanding of bills and experiences on cooperative websites, and provide guidance to boards and executive staff on new services and programs to best meet the needs of members.
Contact us to sign up or learn more about online focus groups or Forums with Friends.