How To Recruit Participants for Focus Groups
Here are several approaches to recruit participants for a focus group. The relevance of FG results depends mainly on its participants and the moderator.
Before you start recruiting people, be sure who you want to target – profile of your respondents and structure of the group.
Your database or CRM
If you plan to ask your customers, your internal sources will be usually the easiest to recruit respondents. Remember that your customers have already built an attitude towards your company or products and have experience with your services.
(And always check that they have given you their permission to be contacted.)
Your database or CRM
If you plan to ask your customers, your internal sources will be usually the best to recruit respondents. Note: Always check that they have given you their permission to be contacted.
Research panel
Market research or fieldwork companies can use their online access panels to recruit the respondents. You can also conduct a screening study during recruitment.
External FG recruitment companies
There are specialists in focus group recruitment. They have a network of recruiters covering the whole country to help you find the requested participants.
Institutions from the target niche
Social media
Online media
Partners, suppliers
PPC campaign
Geotargeting in market research
Cold emails, cold calls – not suitable as the success rate is very low and costs are usually very high. Some recruiters also use the advertisement on job portals. In general, we don’t recommend these approaches.
Recruitment screener for focus groups
Eliminate professional respondents in focus groups
During the focus group recruitment process, ask potential participants about their experience with focus groups in the past. Some people are professional FG attendees and their opinions can be skewed from many past focus groups, you don’t want these respondents in your session. How to do it? You can add a simple question to the screener:
Have you taken part in a focus group in the last 6 months?
If they say yes, don’t invite them.
Recruit more respondents than you will need
Rarely all invited people arrive – prepare what to do in this situation – will you take them as well, or will you ask them to leave with an incentive?
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Focus Group & Discussion Boards platform
Text-based chatrooms, discussion boards, forums for market researchers.
Building your qualitative online research project has never been so easy. The setup takes you only a few minutes.
Fast learning curve, onboarding video tutorials & live support.
Custom app development possible.
30-day trial + free plan available