Creating Insight – our method

We used two primary tools to create insight:

Our gateway questionnaire

The gateway questionnaire was designed to capture demographic information:

  • participant’s background (member of public or subject matter expert),
  • disability,
  • age group,
  • gender,
  • sexual orientation,
  • borough/region of residence,
  • ethnic group,
  • current employment status,
  • employment in public/non-profit sector, and
  • willingness to be contacted for future GM Devo campaigns.

Our online workshop

Between 17th June and 8th July 2016, 601 people joined the online workshop, 17% of which became “most active” participants, sharing 1,374 ideas comments and votes across the 4 challenge questions:

  • Lack of confidence and self-belief
    Why do some people lack the confidence and self-belief to be active?
  • Lack of time
    What tips do you have for people who say they don’t have the time to be active?
  • Local leisure facilities and parks
    What stops people from using local leisure facilities and parks? And why?
  • Getting more active
    What can successfully get more people, more active, more often? How does your idea or experience help to tackle issues with confidence, time and leisure facilities/parks?

The benefit of using an online workshop is that we have a digital record of what people think and say that can be mined for themes and signals using the latest qualitative research techniques. This means we avoid the risks in typical workshops of the facilitator cherry-picking the data or participants feeling too embarrassed to say what they really feel in front of their peers.

We’ve been asked “is this digital approach better suited to younger people?”.  The data showed this was not the case. 52.07% of participants were over 45 (46.12% between the ages of 45 and 65) and 47.44% were under 44. This shows that the online workshop was used by people across all age groups.