If your organization is committed to achieving its DEI goals, you’ll likely need to assimilate new perspectives about your organization and the needs of stakeholders and prospective members. You may need to develop a whole new approach to outreach and engagement, and perhaps a whole new set of programs and services, too. Then commit to a step-by-step process of continuous learning, strategizing, testing, measuring, and adapting.
Here’s what you’ll gain from targeted research to support your DEI efforts. The kind of actionable insight that helps to bridge gender, ethnic, cultural, and generation gaps. That attracts and keeps interest and members to your organization. That ensures greater diversity, engagement, and satisfaction.
If you want to move the needle, it’s time to adopt an approach that’s built on behavioral psychology—the science of how and why we make decisions. For example, you might nudge a prospective member to join your association early in her career with the right mix of professional development opportunities. But if she is put off by what she considers a culturally insensitive social media post or one of those unconscious bias signals that creep up in the ways organizations communicate, you may lose her.
Thus, it’s important to understand both who—in all their diversity—your prospective stakeholders and members are and what will motivate them to act. What do they value? Who do they listen to? What information do they seek? How do they perceive your organization? And what barriers might prevent them from joining?
Amidst significant demographic and cultural shifts, are you catering to a dwindling subset of professionals in your field? Or are you welcoming—better yet, actively encouraging—younger and more diverse professionals to enter the ranks?
You can be sure we’ll customize our approach to meet the needs of your organization. But if you’re just getting started, here’s a roadmap that will help you apply research to improve your DEI outcomes.
Clarify What You Know
First, let’s conduct a scan. You’ll collect and we’ll analyze the best information you can provide— marketing campaign strategies and messaging, demographic and transaction reporting, market penetration, and so on. Together, we’ll come to a shared understanding of what you do or don’t know about your DEI status and have a baseline for further exploration.
Mine Your Data
Then let’s take a deeper dive into your database of current and lapsed stakeholders or members. We’ll help you identify key stakeholder or member segments as well as trends in their engagement history. This will help us understand decision-making. It will help us pinpoint underperforming membership, program, and service categories, and it will allow us to identify important gaps in your data.
Augment Your Data
Next, let’s supplement your existing data with overlays of readily available consumer datasets. With our analysis, you’ll gain a robust view of current, former, and prospective member demographics, behavior, interests, preferences, and needs. The data will come alive through personas that describe commonalities and differences among distinct audience segments. And by mapping your reach within each population, the path to greater diversity, equity, and inclusion will begin to emerge.
Go Direct to the Source
Then let’s survey current and lapsed members—and prospective non-members, too. We’ll begin to explore the attitudes and perceptions of the diverse audience segments your association hopes to attract. Perceptions about your association, its programs and services, its outreach and messaging. Perceptions of cultural sensitivity, inclusiveness, and access. You’ll begin to get answers to the tough questions: Why is member engagement limited? Why did lapsed members leave? What obstacles prevent nonmembers from joining?
Listen and Learn Some More
Armed with nuanced personas that pinpoint potential levers, you’ll have real insight into how to recruit, retain, and engage each audience. You’ll create new membership messaging and promotional content. Then through focus groups, interviews, or both, we’ll encourage candid feedback—particularly as we explore more sensitive issues. This will help you further refine your strategy before rollout and mitigate potential risks.
Keep Advancing
Build offerings, training, and engagement strategies—anchored on fresh evidence—to drive your DEI outcomes. At each stage, we’ll summarize key findings and actionable recommendations. You’ll gain actionable insight you can put to work immediately—monitoring against baselines and milestones. As your success mounts, new research questions will likely emerge. If you like, we can help you develop a comprehensive approach to ongoing data collection, application, knowledge management, and continuous improvement.
At EurekaFacts, we live in pursuit of the Eureka moment—when our research delivers that golden nugget of actionable insight you need to influence audience behavior and drive the change you seek. To deliver, our interdisciplinary team of experts crafts custom research solutions to address your most vexing challenges. In fact, we’ve been serving up smart research solutions for our government, nonprofit, and association clients for two decades.
We’ve built a highly qualified, multilingual team of PhD-level methodologists, analysts, and experts in qualitative and quantitative research, consumer and cognitive psychology, social and behavioral sciences, organizational psychology research methodology, as well as econometrics, statistical modeling, and advanced analytics.
And we take quality seriously. We’re one of the only International Organization for Standardization (ISO 20252) certified firms for market, public opinion and social research you’ll find.
Great! Let’s talk. Share your DEI challenges. We’ll share our data-driven approach to help you overcome them. Where can we reach you to schedule a call?