Running a Focus Group

On the first of April I ran my first solo focus group for YellowBanana.com and lets just say that it’s a lot harder in practice than it was in theory.

The idea of the focus group was to get feedback from teachers to find out how they source students now and if they would use the YellowBanana product.

 For the readers who haven’t heard about YB its Australia’s first online directory for all things in regard to Learning. The idea of it is to have teachers (not just teachers in physical classrooms but people who could teach anything from Juggling to Uni degrees)list there class for “learners” to find.

Anyway, the job was left to the Marketing Intern and me, the PR intern to meet and discuss what we wanted to find which was what would make people want to use this website rather than sites like Gumtree and community notice boards. With this outlook we came up with a set of questions for the guests to answer regarding how they teach and what they will pay for YB services. 

Next came the task of actually getting people to attend the focus group. The promise of hot food and alcoholic drinks just wasn't good enough for people to attend. the problems in actually getting people interested in teaching to attend the event. we aimed to set the event at 6pm hopefully getting people who had just finished work. I have learnt now that many people don't want to hang around after work and would rather go home. After this first focus group Ben and myself have learnt  as a team we need to work on spreading the message to wider community and finding a better time to suit everyone's needs. Not only that but we need to keep following up and making sure teachers will definitely attend because out of twenty-three people who clicked attending less than half actually turned up.

Next time I get people to answer questions about the website I believe that it would have been better to have people play around with the site first then run through the questions with everyone as a group. Instead our mentor decided that it would be best to leave everyone to fill in the questionnaire as the had a play around. I can understand why it was done this way but I still believe that the way Ban and myself wanted would have worked better. 

I do understand the benefit of focus groups now. Not only are we finding out what people want but we are letting key public's know that YellowBanana is a product for them. It was beyond helpful to get feedback from non-biased people about what they want so we can do it. I really enjoyed running a focus group and I'm looking forward to doing another one with my new practical skills. Practice makes perfect.