Setting up a research panel at the Heritage Fund
As part of our work to change our services, we’ve been conducting primary user research at the National Lottery Heritage Fund for just over a year and in that time, we’ve been recruiting everyone we speak to as we need to speak to them.
We’ve run research with 230 people which means we’ve individually contacted at least that many people, but more likely around 300 people, to invite them to research (some people weren’t available or interested when we asked). Most of these people didn’t know we were doing research or that participating in our work was an option until they got our call or email.
There are a few pros and cons to this approach.
Pros:
- We choose who we invite carefully and include people who can tell us about the part of the journey we need them to.
- We get a wide range of applicants to the Heritage Fund and we can target people from different UK locations so we can understand regional differences.
Cons:
- It takes a lot of time. We tend to allow at least a few days to recruit people for research and even then, it’s sometimes a squeeze. It makes it harder for us to deliver user research findings quickly.
- We don’t know how people identify until we contact them. We’ve been using our application form as consent to contact people, and in that form we don’t gather things like their gender, their ethnicity or if they have any disabilities for this purpose. This has made recruiting representative groups for research a lot more difficult.
We’re actively focusing on making the work of our team more inclusive, so struggling to have representative groups isn’t good enough.
To address this, we’re setting up a new research panel. The panel will allow people who are interested in helping us design more inclusive and equitable services at the Fund to sign up. People who sign up can share their lived experiences of funding, applications, running projects and so much more. Their voices and contributions will make our services better.
When people sign up, we ask them about themselves, their experience of working on projects and how they identify to help us recruit more diverse groups for research. We’re as interested in hearing from people with no experience of funding and working on projects as we are in hearing from people about the current experience of our funding.
If you’re interested, you can sign up to join our research panel here.
How the panel works
When people sign up to the panel, they fill in a Microsoft form. There are three sections for information:
- About them
- About their experience with projects and fundraising
- About how they identify
We know that asking people questions about how they identify can be a sensitive topic, so each question has an option to not disclose and most questions have an option for people to self-describe. Where we don’t need structured data and there are a very large number of possible descriptions, like ethnicity, we haven’t asked for it using a list of options to choose from. Instead, we’ve provided a text box so people can tell us about themselves in the way that they want to.
At the end of the form there’s also a section for consent. To store people’s data and use it in this way, we need their explicit consent to meet our GDPR requirements. In this section, people are asked to make an active choice to join the panel or to not join the panel.
If people choose to join the research panel, when they submit the form, we email them a confirmation with a reminder about how to change their mind and what will happen next. This is a conditional email which we trigger using Power Automate. It allows us to send different emails to people depending on what they choose. After we send the email, Power Automate then adds their details to the protected spreadsheet where we store the panel.
If people choose not to join and choose to give us an email address we can email them a confirmation that we haven’t added them to the research panel. People who choose not to join the research panel can still take part in research, but we’re less likely to contact them directly.
We’re now piloting the panel. We invited a small group of people who recently applied for funding so that we can test how it works and see how people respond to the questions. So far that’s going well, we invited 25 people and in the first 24 hours 5 people have already signed up!
