Research – You?ve got mail

Steven Hadley celebrates the value of using email for audience research.
When Belfast Children?s Festival (BCF) launched its own dedicated computerised box office and online sales system in May 2005, it was able to access, for the first time, a range of detailed and accurate information about its customers. This also opened up the potential for gathering even more information through an email survey. Having invested heavily in a new brand and the design and print of marketing materials, BCF wanted to measure new attenders? awareness of the brand, its advertising campaign and its print, by asking questions such as: ?Where did this family market get its information from?? and ?Are traditional media still a worthwhile investment for a small organisation with a limited marketing budget??

To research this, it was decided that, in the week following the festival, a sample of attenders should be targeted by email. BCF and Audiences Northern Ireland (NI) worked together to compile a questionnaire, and the agency developed online access to it on the BCF website. Every patron with an email address (around 400 people ? 20% of BCF?s marketing lists) was sent an email with a hyperlink to the online questionnaire, with completion incentivised by a prize of £25 M&S vouchers. Each completed questionnaire was sent by email to Audiences NI, and was also set up to capture data from the form as a csv (comma separated variables) file, which sat on BCF?s server. As all the data submitted flowed automatically into the spreadsheet, the analysis and quantifying of the response data was easily achieved as we could remotely download the file on a daily/hourly basis, as required.

The technology used to achieve this was integral to the project. As BCF?s website is hosted on a server that supports PHP scripts, we were able to download an open source script that could be tailored to suit the needs of the organisation. One script in particular, aFormMail (a free PHP script that allows website visitors to send information from web forms to an email address), stood out in terms of its features and relative ease of use.

BCF sent the email early on a Thursday lunchtime to ensure that the message and content was still fresh for people accessing their emails from home in the evening and over the weekend. Thirty-three per cent of all respondents submitted completed questionnaires on the day the email was sent, with 77% of these responding outside of work hours (after 5.30pm). By the Monday morning 70% of all respondents had submitted their forms. The final response rate for the online questionnaire was 27%. Respondents were 85% female and 80% were aged 25?44. (MORI Ireland Technology Tracker October to December 2004 indicated that 47% of Internet users in Northern Ireland were aged 25?44 and that of all Internet users aged over 16, 47% were female).

Ninety-eight per cent of respondents wished to receive regular email updates on children?s events and 83% were happy to be contacted for future surveys or focus groups. Given that 57% of respondents also left (often quite lengthy and overwhelmingly positive) comments, it is clear that the BCF has a committed family audience who are eager and willing to engage in an ongoing dialogue with the organization. The initial set-up of the form, along with testing, took two or three days. For future similar projects we anticipate this should only require one day, which means we should be able to devise, compile, set up, test and deliver an online questionnaire within three days and can expect the bulk of responses with 48 hours ? which means this can all be achieved from Monday to Friday. And in the case of Belfast Children?s Festival, the entire cost of the project to our client organisation was £25 in vouchers.

Steven Hadley is Audience Development Manager at Audiences Northern Ireland, the audience development agency for Northern Ireland, t: 028 9043 6482;
e: [email protected]. The Belfast Children?s Festival is run by Young at Art.
e: [email protected]