Non-Profit Research to Understand and Elevate the Volunteer Experience

Non-Profit Research to Understand and Elevate the Volunteer Experience

Non-Profit Research to Understand and Elevate the Volunteer Experience

When you hear or read the phrase, “market research”, what comes to mind? For most it likely elicits mental images of large brands, slow timelines, and thoughts of huge project costs (we’d argue that it’s an investment and not a cost, but I digress). While true, larger research programs span hundreds of thousands of dollars; smaller projects can be as agile and affordable as you need them to be.

Enter Dog Aide, a non-profit organization in the Detroit area that helps dogs and their owners with varying levels of support made possible by their pool of passionate volunteers. Dog Aide cares about whether their volunteers are having a positive experience and about what they can do to make it enjoyable to grow their ranks. We crafted a research program aimed at just these very objectives, and it was a homerun experience for both parties. 

Non-Profit Research

This research was incredibly fun for us to carry out because we knew we would be making a big impact at a non-profit – we always aim to deliver recommendations that are attainable and can be transitioned quickly into action. Dog Aide has given us permission to share a few with you all, so here are some results that we found interesting and that could have a wider impact beyond the non-profit space:

Volunteer Engagement in Non-Profit

Dog Aide’s varying volunteer pool (current volunteers, lapsed volunteers, and those yet to volunteer but signed up with the organization) prefers communications to come across different channels. Some of Dog Aide’s volunteers were finding out about opportunities too late because they simply didn’t check that particular communication platform regularly. 

Implication for other categories: Your potential customers most likely won’t be reached with a single media vehicle – to maximize your reach and audience, you need to have multiple outlets of communication.

Dog Aide wanted to know how to reinforce and drive engagement with their volunteers and what we discovered was that regardless of the type of volunteer, everyone wanted to know the outcome or impact of their efforts:

Non-Profit Research

Implication for other categories: Whether it be volunteers for a non-profit or your most stalwart brand champions, when people put extra effort and time into supporting a cause or product, they want to know if their blood, sweat, or tears made an impact. A great way to drive engagement with your brand or products is to show that you care about the time and effort people put in – how that manifests will vary greatly across categories and industries, but it’s still something that should be given some thought.

9 in 10 current and lapsed volunteers rate Dog Aide’s volunteer experience highly. And among people interested in volunteering but had no volunteer experience were asked of their impression of the organization and those were equally as high.

Implications for other categories: None! This is just an overall amazing number to see and if anything, other organizations should copy as much as they can to help drive their own engagement and sentiment.

 

Non-Profit Research

Research doesn’t need to cumbersome or expensive – it can be far more attainable than you think. In our April Newsletter, we give some ideas and guidance on how to achieve actionable market research when you are part of a smaller organization or when you really need to stretch and make the most of a smaller budget. If a small non-profit organization can run meaningful and sound market research, so can you! 

 

 

Andre Barroso

DIRECTOR, INSIGHTS & INNOVATION
CATAPULT INSIGHTS

Tales from the Road: Petaluma Reuseable Cup Project

Tales from the Road: Petaluma Reuseable Cup Project

Tales from the Road: Petaluma Reuseable Cup Project

Catapult Segmentation

The team at Catapult Insights has been hard at work understanding how people think about sustainability. Most recently, we went to Petaluma, California to explore an exciting program many of the town’s cafés and QSRs were participating in: a reusable cup program which aims to reduce waste and promote a more eco-friendly existence. 

The basic premise is that various establishments around town collectively joined forces to use special, new cups that were designed to be returned, washed, and reused in place of single-use, disposable cups. Collection bins were placed in various high-traffic locations in addition to in and around the stores that opted into the program.

Not only is the program itself a refreshing attempt at waste-reduction, but it’s also a fascinating opportunity to examine the human elements that would determine program success. The Catapult Insights team spent time on the ground observing patrons and engaging directly in discussions about the program. We focused on perceptions, understanding, and behavioral elements that each played a role in if, when, and how individuals would participate.  

Understanding people works best by listening and watching, because what they say doesn’t always match what they do! Like so many instances, having a research team present allowed us to parse through noise to understand the signal, which gave us the insights needed to explain the program’s participation rates and develop strategies to engrain within consumers’ routines.

In the end, our time in Petaluma was filled with insight and fun, and while the pilot program has concluded we anticipate we haven’t seen the last of this concept.

JUSTIN SUTTON

CO-FOUNDER
CATAPULT INSIGHTS

The Importance of Flexibility in Research

The Importance of Flexibility in Research

The Importance of Flexibility in Research

The research industry is filled with people who combine discipline with curiosity. Discipline drives us to practice responsibly and maintain high standards and rigors, while curiosity pushes us to constantly learn, adapt, and evolve. It’s an interesting tension between rigidity and flexibility, and I find fellow researchers have no shortage of stories about striking a balance between the two. 

My background in both research and innovation has me leaning into the curious, flexible side, but long before my career as a researcher began, I thought I would be an engineer. Sitting down with an academic advisor, a 4-year plan was laid out for me to earn an engineering degree, but I was surprised how few options I had. “I was expecting a little more room to individualize and be creative,” I told the advisor. The response was something along the lines of “This is the one path,” so on to business school I went. Afterall, I’m wired to be as structured as I am innovative.

Fast forward 25 years and I’ve amassed a number of researcher stories of my own throughout my consulting career. And I think the reason I’m successful, and further, actually enjoy the unexpected, is because of how I am wired.

I recently worked on a qual-quant study which aimed to explore how people think and talk about a new technology embedded in a home product. This particular product is one that almost everyone in the U.S. uses daily, but some clever engineers found a way to deliver a highly scientific, yet elegant, set of new benefits. It became evident during the qualitative interviews that people were a long way from comprehending the tech integration of the product and the messaging we were testing. In other words, the messaging was not ready to move to quant testing as we had originally planned.

The pivot came midway through the qualitative interviews, as we adjusted the messages and the discussion guide to follow the emerging insights. The further we explored, the more consumer confusion we unearthed that pointed to a need to expand the marketing communications. It was like we kept shining light in new directions and continually found more critical needs to be addressed.

A second pivot in the project came as Catapult Insights and our client jointly decided a second round of qual would be more valuable than the quant we initially planned. The amazing part is that we pivoted to a new plan without losing any momentum in the project, all before the end of the initial qual phase. I won’t pull back the curtain entirely, but I will say there are many researchers I’ve worked with in the past that would have struggled (and grumbled) behind the scenes to make this adjustment. Instead, it was a smooth and easy transition for us because we worked so closely with our clients along the way.

Just Walk Out
Checkout

Another project that comes to mind was a pricing study for a personal care product. The first tricky part of this work was the novelty of the product itself, which introduced an anchoring bias in our initial Gabor-Granger results. The second tricky part about this work was that our client was entering a new-to-them space with the product, so the pricing work needed to be precise to be successful.

Luckily, we have the very best statistician who was able to identify the anchoring bias, and we consulted our client on next steps. That’s when we devised a plan to triangulate pricing through a second pricing study using a monadic testing design. The results not only were precise and impactful, but they also gave our client the confidence they needed to move forward.

And one of the first projects Jill and I did as Catapult Insights was an innovation project with an automotive client. As is the case with many projects involving ideation, we started by defining the areas of opportunity as a group, using research data to help guide our decisions. This is an all-too-often overlooked phase of ideation that sets the guiderails for solution development. Would you be shocked to hear that 7 out of 10 times the opportunities we define are NOT the same as we thought they would be? It’s true, and this project (like many others) featured a highly valuable adjustment to the problem statements we spent time ideating against.

Unexpected twists and turns are part of the research journey, and as Tyson says, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” My advice is to surround yourself with a team who can embrace reality and roll with the punches. Those who are truly great in this field are the ones who can master the art of flexibility with the science of research. 

JUSTIN SUTTON

CO-FOUNDER
CATAPULT INSIGHTS

2024 Year End Reflections with Catapult Insights

2024 Year End Reflections with Catapult Insights

2024 Year End Reflections with Catapult Insights

Like most years, it feels like 2024 went by in a flash. It was a year of growth, connection, and exploration for Catapult Insights, and while we are quickly approaching the end of the year, we wanted to take a moment to pause and reflect on the experiences that made our 2024 a memorable year. Read on to hear from our team as we look back at 2024 and the experiences, adventures, and risks we’ve taken together. 

Catapult Segmentation

If you had to pick a single word or phase to describe your 2024, what would it be?

Jill: Change. My family and Catapult Insights HQ relocated to Washington over the summer, and it was definitely an adventure. While my family loves our new home, and it has been wonderful to be so geographically close to many of our clients, the move hasn’t been without its challenges. From finding my way in a new town and adjusting to life as a Washingtonian after a decade in the desert, to navigating the world of moving a business from one state to another, I’ve experienced my share of surprises and speed bumps. But, with the support of our team and my family, we’re now settled in and looking forward to a 2025 that doesn’t involve quite as many changes. 

Justin: Affirmation. We work with a lot of clients, but there are a few that have quickly amassed a body of work with us to support some big initiatives. This is particularly rewarding to me, because I love to see insights in action. It’s affirming to know that the consumer voices I’ve studied and represented are shaping our client’s view of the world. Our work is helping clients address needs of underserved markets, improve real people’s everyday lives, and making sustainability changes that will leave a mark that far exceeds my time on the planet. It’s what we set out to do when we started Catapult Insights years ago, and seeing it happen is a dream come true.

Andre: Adaptability. My son was born late last year (my second child), and this year was partly about learning how to juggle a budding baby and a toddler finding her emotions just outside of my home office door, while working on some really incredible and in-depth client work. Learning to become like water and move with the tides has really elevated the level of service I can provide to Catapult Insights’ clients (why pay for an army when you can hire a tactical team to achieve the same results?) and also allows me to be there for my family when they need it most.

What are you most looking forward to in 2025?

Andre: Growth (both personal and professional) – a new year to me represents endless possibilities. That’s the beauty of working for and supporting a company like Catapult Insights, there is an energy in the air where anything is possible and a new year totally encapsulates that. Growth and change are intertwined and the only thing you can control in those situations is your personal outlook. I can safely say that my personal outlook is positive and super charged; I’m ready to take on anything. 

Are there any trends you expect to emerge in 2025? Or others you expect (or hope) will disappear?

Justin: I often joke that research approaches are cyclical. One year I travel so much I hit status with airlines and hotels. The next we see a trend of virtual approaches (and I lose all my status). My hope for 2025 is that it be a year of balance. We believe in approach agnosticism and there’s such great potential to unlock when designing multi-method research, so here’s my wishcasting that 2025 is an exceptionally balanced year of reaching our research subjects in a multitude of ways.

Was there anything that surprised you in 2024?

Jill: The number of intercept interviews we did this year! Intercepts have always been a staple in our research methodology toolkit, but we saw a higher than usual demand for them in 2024. I think it was a combination of our clients feeling the squeeze in their budgets and timelines (do more with less, and faster!), and a need for insights into the customer/shopper experience that led to the increase in intercept interview projects.  I, personally, loved it as it is a great way to gather important information to help our clients make some big decisions without sucking up their entire budget and taking weeks or months to do. I hope this trend continues in 2025!

What was your favorite project in 2024?

Andre: A controversial choice, but my favorite project this year has been an ongoing employee experience tracker. 2024 has been an intense learning year with my kids (a baby and toddler) and working from home so the consistency and expectations that a tracker brings was a much-welcomed breath of fresh air in between all the new product development and brand-related work we’ve been doing over here. Plus, it always feels great to know that you are helping employees have a voice via research to their corporate office. 

Jill: There were so many great ones, it’s hard to choose! We worked on several new product development projects this year and they were all very interesting, challenging, and fun. Especially the ones that involved a combination of research methodologies – those really allowed us to contextualize the insights and help our clients make some important decisions with confidence. Plus, it is always exciting to know you were involved in the development of a new product that will soon be on store shelves, especially when you win a Quirks Award for your work like we did in 2024

Justin: A series of related projects focused on reinventing a symbol that is central to a brand’s public identity and CX. We’re several projects deep at this point and have a few left to go, but this is going to be a big and meaningful shift that will help reduce waste and help the environment. While that’s a positive and lofty goal, we’re helping our client make this move while remaining true to their brand identity and maintaining (or improving) CX. This is a brand that more than 9-in-10 of the people reading this are highly familiar with, so the stakes are high!

As we close out 2024 and venture into 2025, we’re feeling grateful, fulfilled, inspired, and excited for what the next year has in store for us and our wonderful client partners. Cheers to 2024!

THE CATAPULT INSIGHTS TEAM 

From Insight to Impact: Launching a Product for Curly-Haired Consumers

From Insight to Impact: Launching a Product for Curly-Haired Consumers

From Insight to Impact: Launching a Product for Curly-Haired Consumers

Catapult Segmentation

Behind every award-worth project is a story for teamwork, challenges, and innovation.

Did you know that roughly 65% of people have some degree of curl in their hair, be it loose waves, spirals, or tight coils? If you don’t have curly hair you might not know how challenging it can be to manage and maintain those beautiful locks of curls—frizz, dryness, damage, and difficulty detangling can be a daily struggle.

Understanding the difficulty of daily maintenance of curly hair, Delta Faucet Company partnered with Catapult Insights to embark on a journey to truly make a difference for our curly-haired friends and family. Their product, the VersaCurl™ detangling shower tool, is already winning industry accolades by enhancing shower routines via quicker, easier, and more enjoyable experiences. Now we’re thrilled that this effort has been recognized as a Quirks Excellence in Insights Award Winner!

Catapult Insights Co-Founder Justin Sutton

We invite you to a behind-the-scenes look at how we partnered with Sequoyah Glenn, founder of 924 CoOp Consultants, and Statistical Expert Tom Rosholt to combine empathy, human-centered design, and data to build winning product and go-to-market strategies is already earning industry accolades and we are so proud of the work we did together to create better solutions for curly haircare. 

You’ve Got a Great Idea… How to Break Through the Noise


Above all else, our goal was to deeply understand the routines, struggles, and underserved needs of individuals caring for curly, textured hair. From there, we investigated the intersection between Delta’s expertise in understanding water and the consumers’ haircare needs. The haircare industry is highly competitive, with well-established brands that already dominate in terms of trust, marketing power, and customer loyalty. If Delta were to bring an offering to market, our goal was to do so authentically and remain true to the people we aimed to help
.

There are several key elements that we needed to understand before we could create a strategy to rise in the haircare world. Delta’s core challenges:

      • Understand Consumer Behavior: Fully understand the routines, challenges, and hair care tasks among those with curly hair.
      • Market Sizing: Determine the size of the curly-haired market and understand what motivates individuals to engage with new hair care tools.
      • Product Usage: Gain insights into how users might utilize the tool and what benefits VersaCurl delivers in real-life scenarios.
      • Effective Messaging: Identify relevant and meaningful messages that resonate with the target audience.
      • Product Pricing Strategy: Develop a data-driven pricing strategy that allows for a confident product launch.

For Delta, these steps were critical for successfully introducing a new product to a crowded and competitive industry.

Authenticity Through Listening and Learning

VersaCurl is specifically designed to address the needs of textured hair, which is most commonly found in Black and Hispanic communities. Recognizing the importance of cultural relevance, we assembled a team with diverse cultural, research, and industry backgrounds to guide the development of the tool and go-to-market strategy.

Curly textured hair detangling

To build empathy and establish a deeper connection with the target market, Catapult Insights designed a Culture and Communication Conference for Delta’s cross-functional stakeholder team. This immersive experience included moderated focus groups in partnership with 924 CoOp Consultants. This new approach blends moderated conversations, observation, and individual connections between Delta’s stakeholders and consumer representatives from hypothesized consumer segments. These immersive sessions were interspersed with storytelling and message development workshops, allowing us to refine our approach as the conference progressed.

Our approach fostered deep empathy-building, helping Delta understand the lives, needs, and reactions of key consumer groups. Sessions provided valuable insights on how Delta could communicate in this new category among distinct cultural segments, ensuring the product’s authenticity while accounting for nuances rooted in consumer behaviors and needs. 

The Final Push: Getting the Price Right

A cornerstone of the go-to-market (GTM) strategy—the pricing research needed to be rooted in accuracy and reliability while retaining speed to accommodate internal product decision-making timelines.

We worked with Tom Rosholt to design a Gabor-Granger pricing analysis to guide Delta on the pricing for this new-to-company product. Optimal price points were uncovered, but after a successful readout of the results, Delta and Catapult Insights challenged themselves to get the pricing just right, because creating a new product in a new category comes with unique challenges and considerations.

Building from a base of data and findings, we wanted to ensure Delta’s VersaCurl would be available in the right channels and at a price that accurately reflected its value to haircare routines. To do this, we conducted a tactical follow-up pricing study using a monadic design to assess price receptivity while minimizing anchoring bias. The findings from this study were analyzed alongside data from the initial research, creating a triangulated, data-driven pricing strategy that inspired confidence and aligned with the tool’s value proposition.

The Result

An innovative, industry award-winning shower tool and a green light to continue development for launch.

What Our Delta Clients are Saying

“Together, Catapult Insights and 924 CoOp Consultants fostered an environment of collaboration and innovation. Their ability to work seamlessly with our diverse teams ensured that every aspect of the project was executed flawlessly. We were particularly impressed by their flexibility and adaptability during the Home Use trial, which provided the final push needed to move the project into the go-to-market strategy.”

Sara Falzone & Colin Byard, Market Research Analyst & Innovation Catalyst

Hear directly from Colin on how he approaches innovation:
Watch Driving Market Success with Innovation

Home Use Test

“From start to finish, partnering with Catapult Insights and 924 CoOp to learn more about textured hair care has been an amazing experience. I felt listened to. I felt challenged. And now, I feel empowered to make the right decisions.”

Kyle Duffy, Innovation Marketing Manager

“The addition of both Catapult Insights and 924 into our DFC teams was indeed seamless; the larger team quickly “normed” such that all voices and opinions were readily accepted and heard. Which ultimately led to very timely acquisition of needed research results, meeting our stakeholders’ needs.”

Tom Gospel, Senior Product Manager, B!G Innovation Lab

The Takeaway

This case study provides a blueprint for using qualitative research to inform product development, quantitative pricing strategies, and cultural empathy in marketing. The integration of empathy-driven focus groups, cultural insights, home usage test (HUT), ethnographic approaches, and rigorous pricing analysis highlights the importance of a multi-layered approach in delivering products that meet consumer needs and succeed in competitive markets.

From a broader perspective, this project evolved over more than 10 distinct research engagements with Delta, each building toward a comprehensive understanding of the market and consumer needs. This article highlights a few cornerstone moments along the way, offering key takeaways from the journey.

For market researchers, this project underscores the value of collaboration, iteration, and the application of both soft and hard data in making informed, consumer-centric decisions.

By combining deep consumer understanding with precise, data-driven strategies, Delta’s launch of its VersaCurl is a multifaceted example of how to develop a product that fills a market gap and creates lasting consumer connections.

If you’re interested in broader best practices for developing go-to-market strategies, we invite you to reach out to us for a deeper discussion.

THE CATAPULT INSIGHTS TEAM 

The Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, powered by Quirk’s Media, recognize the researchers, suppliers and products and services that are adding value and impact to marketing research. Finalists and winner are selected by a panel of judges made up of a combination of end-client researchers, supplier partners and Quirk’s editorial staff.

About Quirk’s
Quirk’s Marketing Research Media produces a print and digital magazine, e-newsletters, events, industry awards, webinars and the most comprehensive website – all of which is devoted entirely to professionals responsible for conducting, coordinating and purchasing marketing research products and services. Designed to promote the understanding, use and value of marketing research, Quirk’s free resources include original articles on research techniques, case studies, news, survey findings, global listings for conferences and jobs, LinkedIn groups, webinars and the most complete and up-to-date directories of market research product and service companies. To get your own free access visit www.quirks.com.

2024 Quirk’s Award Finalist

2024 Quirk’s Award Finalist

2024 Quirk’s Award Finalist

Catapult Segmentation

 

We are proud to announce that we have been recognized by Quirk’s Media for our collaboration with Delta Faucet Company on their upcoming VersaCurl Detangling Hand Shower. As a finalist, Catapult Insights would love for you to join us at the virtual awards ceremony on November 19 – register here today!

Delta Faucet, a leader in the durable good and home fixtures space, was preparing to bring a bold in-shower hair tool to market. Delta dedicated immense time and resources to deeply and fully understanding the needs of those caring for curly and coily hair to ensure their solution could meaningfully address lifelong struggles. This learning journey featured a carefully curated supplier team to represent a diversity of cultures, research, and industry backgrounds to help Delta leverage their expertise in water to better tailor the showering experience for those with textured hair. Delta, Catapult Insights, and 924 CoOp took risks together with first-of-its-kind research approaches designed to bring Delta closer to their consumer audience, develop empathetic understanding, and remain true to Human Centered Design principles in their pursuit of better solutions for an often-under-served market. The result was an industry award-winning haircare tool and a greenlight to continue development for launch.

Delta is already earning industry accolades and we are so proud of the work we did together to create better solutions for curly haircare. 

 

THE CATAPULT INSIGHTS TEAM 

The Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, powered by Quirk’s Media, recognize the researchers, suppliers and products and services that are adding value and impact to marketing research. Finalists are selected by a panel of judges made up of a combination of end-client researchers, supplier partners and Quirk’s editorial staff.

The award winners will be announced at The Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards Virtual Ceremony on November 19, 2024. Please visit quirksawards.com for more details.

About Quirk’s
Quirk’s Marketing Research Media produces a print and digital magazine, e-newsletters, events, industry awards, webinars and the most comprehensive website – all of which is devoted entirely to professionals responsible for conducting, coordinating and purchasing marketing research products and services. Designed to promote the understanding, use and value of marketing research, Quirk’s free resources include original articles on research techniques, case studies, news, survey findings, global listings for conferences and jobs, LinkedIn groups, webinars and the most complete and up-to-date directories of market research product and service companies. To get your own free access visit www.quirks.com.

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