SimpsonScarborough discussed with Ruth Watson, MBA Marketing Manager for the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, the bulletin board SimpsonScarborough recently conducted for her institution.

Q.    What business challenges were you trying to address by running a bulletin board with your newly enrolled MBA students?

A.    We wanted to run focus groups with a selection of our MBA class to delve into their decision making process, and find out more about what aspects of our MBA offering attracted them.  We also wanted to do some comparisons between nationality and industry sector. 

Q.    Why did you choose to run a bulletin board as opposed to using more traditional qualitative techniques like focus groups or in-depth interviews (IDIs)?

A.    I had heard that this technique was welcomed by participants, and that the relative anonymity allowed for a more frank discussion!  It also worked well for our busy students.  Finding a time to suit all participants had always been a problem in the past. This method allowed students the flexibility to log in when they wanted, which we hoped would improve the participation levels. Also we've had some experience of international groups being hard to balance (face-to-face discussion doesn't suit every nationality and culture) so we felt an online forum would enable some distance, and therefore provide more representative results.

Q.    What was most helpful about the type of information the bulletin board generated for you?

A.       I think that the virtual environment allowed the participants to be more frank in their responses.  I think there was less danger of 'group think' - some of the responses we got varied enormously.  Also, this method allowed us to ask some quantitative questions too, rather than just the qualitative questions you'd typically get at a focus group.  We could give them a list of phrases to respond to, or rank some ideas, for instance.  The online platform made this easy. Also the immediacy of the results allowed us to act quickly afterwards. 

Q.    Was there anything you found challenging about the type of information the board generated?

A.    I think at times the general gist of a question was misinterpreted.  In a physical focus group, this could have been clarified in an instant, but in a virtual environment where participants were logging in at different times, this was perhaps more difficult to remedy.  But having SimpsonScarborough's project manager, Emily, online to nudge the discussion or delve into themes was great. I wish I'd had the time to be online for the whole bulletin board too, but that was hard over a 3-day project.

Q.    Do you have any plans to use bulletin boards in the future?  If so, how?

A.      Definitely.  I love this method. The practical benefits over a physical focus group are numerous.  There is still a need for both, but I would favour this method for a participant group who are busy and hard to pin-down.  I also love to ease of the responses. It's all there, documented and available immediately.