Acumen have worked with Solutions Strategy Research Facilitation Ltd (Solutions Research) for over a decade, working on complex, sensitive and high-impact projects in healthcare, supporting them with participant recruitment.
Recently, we caught up with Michelle, Managing Director of Solutions Research, to reflect on our partnership and how thoughtful, well-managed participant recruitment helps power their work.
We asked her a couple of questions and here's what she had to say:
Solutions is a full-service market research agency that works on projects that make a positive difference to people’s lives. We work on a range of social and sensitive issue projects, often with a focus on health.
We have worked on a range of topics from identifying health conditions, the journey of living with health conditions, vaccination uptake, screening uptake, to public health behaviours, tackling vaping and substance misuse.
We’ve also worked on related topics such as domestic abuse, VAWG and hate crime. We deliver a lot of campaign research as well as attitudinal and behavioural projects.
Finding the ‘right’ people is always a challenge as there are often a range of different criteria that overlay e.g. health condition, social grade, income, area of the country, gender, attitude. It's never a ‘simple’ recruit; plus making sure people are happy to talk in research and really understand what the research is going to be about and how it is going to be used – this is all really important to us in the recruitment process.
I actually think that good recruitment isn’t just about finding the right people, it's about getting them engaged in the research project and ready to take part – if that is done well (which is always is with you) then it makes our job easier, and also makes the whole process run smoothly from a participant process.
Critical – important decisions are being made on the basis of research findings and therefore having the right participants is central to the project.
Mostly in healthcare it is finding the right participants and encouraging people who are not familiar with research to come forward. We always like to have fresh respondents who haven’t attended much research before; and often the hard-to-reach people that we need haven’t engaged in research before and it's important to us to access them.
Research is very competitive at the moment, and I think having a solid, well thought through, audience centric recruitment approach does help when tendering for new work.
You help us throughout the process from the quotation stage when we pass our ideas past you as a sense check (to ensure we don’t recommend something unachievable), then through recruitment screener development, recruitment, taking people through the consent process and delivering after care with respondents
We have recently worked on some tough topics with very tricky recruitment which have required very specific recruitment criteria, and the attention to detail has been fantastic; also by really understanding the intricacies of the brief and who we need as participants, Acumen have been able to assess participants and how well they fit, rather than just how they might appear at face value.
Acumen been flexible and proactive in accessing a range of different routes to find the right participants and also we’ve had open and honest conversations about challenging recruits, and helped us find ways to reconsider the brief and provide options to our clients.
It means that we know we are getting to the right people and can have confidence in who we are talking to, so we can focus on the ‘research bit’
Super nice and friendly team, great recruitment outcomes, honesty about what is and isn’t achievable, that you are happy to think creatively about different ways of getting to the right people; and that you put up with me saying ‘what if we did this….’
Having close regular communication and sharing of anonymised participant details during recruitment really helps us keep close to recruitment, and inform our client
I think participant engagement is very important as it ensures participants come to research ‘warmed up’ and happy to take part – this is particularly important on sensitive issues, and we welcome your personal approach.
I think it impacts at various levels – it means our research findings can be trusted as we have the right people in the room; the excellent project management process means we are kept up to date and there are no surprises (well as few as possible!) and this helps the project run smoothly administratively
Professional and friendly (Sorry, that’s two!)
Yes (I already have!)
