AGRICULTURE EXPERTS GROW THEIR INSIGHTS

The Challenge

How did a publishing house working with a researcher decide how to keep their fading agricultural magazine for busy farmers/growers alive in an online world where print has been declared dead?

The Solution

Civicom CiviSelect^® recruited farmers and growers from target U.S. states. This was not an easy task. The client provided their subscription list to recruit from, but as it was a magazine mailed to the home, it was lacking in email addresses and phone numbers. We therefore had to come up with creative options. First, we mailed all of the subscribers an incentivized offer to participate.

The compensation element resulted in some interested parties who replied via the options we offered, which were email, text, or phone. This allowed us to generate at least one piece of data that we could use to reach out to the farmers for scheduling. We also contacted a farm equipment retailer on a store by store basis, and incentivized the store manager to identify people to participate. Following that effort, we did get several that we were then able to screen for qualification to participate.

We set up focus groups for the moderator, using Civicom CyberFacility^®. These were done in the evening, as the farmers were not able to disrupt their work day for this type of project. In the groups, the farmers/growers viewed current pages of the existing magazine, and then options for new layouts. We then enabled polling features so the moderator could get preferences on content plus rank order preferences. The farmers/growers then viewed stimuli of successful magazines and commented on what they liked or disliked about them. The result was a total overhaul of the agricultural magazine for its subscriber base.

Being creative is often the only way to generate respondents that are difficult to recruit. Working outside of the box led to a successful recruit and ultimately to a successful project for both the project moderator and the magazine.