What have we been talking about – April 2017
'What’s being said' E Group Activity in April 2017 – this month supplied by Ed Newton
As usual a broad spectrum of topics. One of these which recurred throughout the month was looking at client expectations in the light of technological issues. One member recruited participants to an online bulletin board where participants uploaded short videos showing how they search for items via the internet – the problems arose with the slowness of the platform uploading the video. Longest was five hours.
The recruiters reported back that they required an increase in incentive to maintain respondent willingness but the client was unwilling to cooperate. The egroup was asked for their advice and this stimulated quite a few ideas, such as copying the videos onto a memory stick and mailing it. However, we received an update towards the end of the month – “Big thanks to all who have answered. Your suggestions helped me to bring this client to his knees'. All was resolved by the client requesting a report, which had not been quoted for in the original brief. The additional fee included increased incentives.
Paul Hutchins sent us an update on his valuable work assisting refugees arriving in Europe. He is currently in Greece as a volunteer in one of the camps. The website and Facebook page is regularly updated, www.refugeesupport.eu and https://www.facebook.com/RefugeeSupportGreece/. You will be pleased to see that the Facebook pages have several photos of Paul. Paul has now left the ICG and is working full time for Refugee Support. Donations to the charity can be made through either the website, Refugee Support or Facebook.
The issue of weighting was also raised by a member who had conducted an online survey among users of peer to peer platforms in 10 international territories – but was struggling to decide whether to weight the data or not. One member proffered the following advice – “Weighting rarely changes the overall picture much, so if your aim is to get "broad directional insight" into the markets/ issues then unweighted data should be OK so long as you can demonstrate that the unweighted profiles (eg for age and gender, and ideally also for a socioeconomic variable) are broadly in line with your target universe”.
Another member added “If I were you I would first check correlation with age with the key variables you will be reporting, and then determine whether to weight or not. Another decision factor for your decision should be the awareness that weighting has significant impact on the size of sampling error – provided you are assuming some sort of random sampling and are reporting confidence intervals around your estimates”
And one obscure post (field contacts in Rowanda) which appeared “when you should really be in bed” received a reply and recommendation within 10 minutes! Clearly our motto should be 'never caught napping'! and a real demonstration of the reach of the ICG network.
The e-group also had fun recommending some light-heartedness to a member who was struggling to create a set of online community tasks for an imminent project. Some of the contributions for Friday frivolity to lighten the mood included:
- What did the French cheese say on leaving Britain? Brie-exit means Brie-exit!
- You should treat the Friday frivolity more Caerphilly
- What do you call a Frenchman wearing sandals? Philippe Philoppe
- What’s the leading cheese brand in the middle east? Cheeses of Nazareth
Other topics through the month included:
- Differences between brand positioning, brand purpose and ‘value‘ proposition
- DBS checks
- Vets
- Ice cream in Germany, Netherlands and Spain
- Ad and brand awareness
- Professional indemnity Insurance