How to Conduct Market Research with Military Veterans

Posted at: 8/16/2022 12:30 PM

While almost everyone knows a military veteran, this audience can be tricky to reach and recruit for market research. Especially on a large scale!

Luckily for one client who contacted Drive Research, our team has experience with this audience and knows just how to reach them.

This case study outlines the step-by-step process for our most recent veteran recruitment project.

Step 1: The Kickoff

Once a signed contract is in place, our market research firm held a 30-minute kickoff meeting to discuss the project.

In this introductory meeting, we recap:

Core project objectives
Recruitment highlights
Timeline
Drive Research’s recruitment process
Next steps

This kickoff meeting ensures both the client and Drive Research team are on the same page before beginning the study.

Step 2: Screener Development

Following the completed kickoff call, our team began developing the screener we would utilize to pre-qualify military veterans.

The recruitment highlights were as follows:

Must be age 18 or older
Have served in the United States Armed Forces
Describe their military affiliation as a veteran
Have baseline technology access
Have experienced depression symptoms for a week or longer which impacted their typical day-to-day routine
Willingness to learn more about the research program
Diverse demographics

For further context, I recommend reading our blog post What is a Recruitment Screener in Market Research?

Step 3: Programming and Launching the Screener

Upon screener sign-off, our team begins our internal setup. This includes:

Programming the pre-qualification screener in our online system
Creating recruitment materials for our team:

Re-screening questionnaire to confirm qualification
Call sheet to record responses and track all quotas
Email confirmations and other reminder scripts

Briefing our recruitment team on the study
Launching the pre-screener

In general, it takes our qualitative recruiting team 2 to 3 days following screener approval to complete the above steps.

Step 4: Recruiting the Veterans for Market Research

Once our team has built a pool of pre-qualified respondents, we begin our re-screening phone calls and scheduling outreach.

First, our team hand-picks the “best of the best” from a large pool of qualified participants.

In our re-screening calls, we validate qualifications by re-asking questions from the screening questionnaire.

We also include an open-ended question to confirm all participants are articulate, engaged, and able to provide thoughtful responses.

Once a participant has passed the re-screening questionnaire, we schedule their interview.

If our team senses any hesitation whatsoever, the participant is placed on hold status.

Step 5: Confirmations

When choosing a qualitative recruiting firm, be sure they are using multiple, personal outreach methods.

For instance, to ensure participants remain engaged, we run them through a very rigorous confirmation process.

This includes:

Replying to a confirmation email
Accepting a calendar invite
Answering a reminder call the night before
Receiving a reminder text

We ask a lot of our participants, but this rigorous confirmation process is one of the many reasons our firm can boast of an average show rate of 92%! It's important to our team that we do not use automated market research recruitment.