By: Tyler Wood
In the edtech market, companies frequently focus on the decision-maker and leave the end user out of the conversation. Unfortunately, to maintain a sustainable model, it’s critical that you find ways to incorporate the teacher’s input and ensure you’re making products that help improve the educational experience for teachers, students, and administrators—and gaining supporters and edtech influencers in the process. This is where focus groups can come into play.
What?
Focus groups are small groups of diverse people who come together to provide feedback in a planned discussion, responding to guided and/or open-ended questions as part of a company’s market research. In our case, educators’ responses are often analyzed to inform decisions about a new product or solution for schools. Or maybe the group is designed simply to get feedback and intel on current products or solutions, new features, messaging, brand awareness, or company perception.
Why?
Focus groups are qualitative in nature and allow for companies to get first-hand insight into a participant’s thoughts, feelings, opinions, and perceptions on a topic. Ensuring your product is meeting the needs of teachers and students can be hard. Conducting a teacher focus group gives your team an opportunity to hear specifically what educators think of your product and where they wish you would take it.
Who?
Since this blog is focusing on teachers, they are who for this discussion. There are companies that can help with recruiting educator participants for your focus group, but you can also enlist folks on your own through social media. Twitter and Facebook are great channels to share out your interest in getting participants to register and participate. Make sure you create a registration form so you can capture all of their contact details, and make is clear when and where the focus group will take place. After educators have registered, be sure to reach out to them a few times to remind them about their participation and what to expect.
You’ll need to offer an incentive to get educators to participate. Educators especially appreciate Amazon® gift cards because they can use them to buy whatever they want or need for their classrooms. You can easily distribute the gift card electronically at the end of the focus group so they can use it right away. The going rate in edtech is about $100 for in-person focus groups and $50-$100 for online focus groups.
Where?
Attending conferences to hear first-hand what educators think is a great way is to gather feedback, and focus groups are often conducted during a large educational conference in a reserved conference room area. But there are also other methods to solicit feedback. More and more focus groups are now being held virtually in order to be more flexible with schedules and reduce company expense.
When?
Plan your event at least a month ahead of time to ensure you have enough participants to conduct an effective meeting. Ideally, you’d like to have 12–16 educators in attendance. More than that will not allow everyone ample time to share and contribute.
Allow an hour to an hour and a half for the meeting to take place. Make sure to come prepared with questions that have been carefully reviewed by your team ahead of time so there are no surprises. Identify one team member to be your moderator, and make sure that person knows how to probe and go deeper when answers are vague.
In-person focus groups at conferences should be planned to take place during the lunch hour so attendees won’t miss out on a great session or keynote presenter. Make sure to provide lunch so they can get fed and feel as if they killed two birds with one stone.
Online focus groups are often conducted after school hours somewhere between 3 PM and 6 PM (depending on the time zone), which allows teachers to participate without interruption. If you time it right, it would also take place before dinner and not too close to bedtime.
How?
For virtual events, you’ll want to use an online conference platform like GoToMeeting, Zoom, or other software that makes it easy for educators to participate. In addition, it’s best to lay out your questions visually in the form of a presentation using PowerPoint slides. Showing one question per slide helps participants reflect on the question more easily, and these platforms support slide shows. They also allow you to record the meeting so team members who were not able to attend may listen in on what was shared. It’s also important to record because it frees you from worrying about taking notes—you can simply focus on what the participants are sharing.
If you are planning to conduct the meeting during a conference, be sure to plan months ahead and secure a convenient location so that educators don’t have to travel far to get to your meeting. If they have to travel by car, they may end up not coming. It’s best to meet in a room that’s within the conference facility or at a restaurant within short walking distance of the conference.
Compile a set of questions you plan to ask and get input from various teams that you feel could benefit from their feedback: marketing, product, sales, curriculum, etc. Keep the list to 10 questions or fewer so you have enough time to get through them. Make some open-ended so you get great insights and some more granular based on what you need answered in order to move forward from a marketing or product-specific point of view.
Key Points:
Focus groups can be a great way to quickly and affordably gather feedback that helps you learn how to increase your brand awareness. You may find that participants have never heard of your product—use the gathering as an opportunity to determine why not? Focus groups are definitely a worthwhile endeavor, and teachers appreciate the opportunity to give input on a product they may use or wish to use in the future.
Thanks for sharing!