Today is the other half of our two-part series on virtual focus groups, where we specifically tackle the logistics or the backend of virtual focus groups.
First off, there’s a lot of different software and technology that goes into doing virtual focus groups. Although there are ways to use these resources for free, the cost of buying them is relatively low compared to hiring a professional videographer or buying your own video camera and audio system.
Then we break down the setup for a virtual focus group into four buckets: recruiting, communication, the focus group itself, and the wrap-up. We also discuss four parts of the system that you need to nail down to make sure you’re getting the most out of your virtual focus groups.
In this episode, you will hear:
Ways to recruit people who will join your focus group Setting up Google Forms to make it easier for people to respond Why you need to get a confidentiality agreement signed and how to do it Choosing the right platform for running the focus group Ways to pay people online and make sure you don’t Four parts of your system to get all of them in place How to make sure those confidentiality emails are sent How to use Zoom settings that work best for you Why it’s best to have a second person who will help you run the focus group Subscribe and Review
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Supporting Resources:
Larrick Law Firm
If you have any questions about virtual focus groups, don’t hesitate to email me: [email protected].
Ready to get started on doing your own virtual focus groups? Here is a free download that can help you, which includes several resources like a questionnaire and confidentiality agreement.
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants, ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively, then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success? Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.
Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to help you connect with juries and clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom. Now, here’s Elizabeth.
Welcome to another episode of trial lawyer prep. I am your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and we are going to talk about DIY virtual focus groups.
Why? Because that’s what this podcast is designed to do. I want to give you a tip. [00:01:00] Um, literally how to do focus groups, witness prep, trial prep, to prepare your cases better to sleep better at night. And today is our second part of our two part series of virtual focus groups. If you’d like to pause and go listen to part one about what on earth are virtual focus groups and why would I want to do that?
And how would I even do one of those? Go ahead and jump back. To episode number 19, or if you feel really confident in that, or just want to listen to what I have to say today about putting together virtual focus groups and stick around because we are tackling logistics, what I like to call logistics, at least the backend of virtual focus groups.
And there is going to be a checklist for virtual focus groups that I use. Also, I think there’s some forms and the confidentiality that I use all that is going to be in the show notes. [00:02:00] There’s been a download for that. So just to kind of help synthesize a lot of this information and just kind of give you a simple checklist.
So that will definitely be in the show notes. And what I kind of want to do is give an overview. You know, there’s lots of different Software and technology that goes into doing virtual focus groups, but it’s a little bit easier to think about, okay, let’s take it step by step and then talk about the software and the technology kind of all at one piece as well.
I mean, most of this technology is free. Uh, there are ways to do it free and some of it. The thing that you do have to pay for is still really low cost compared to hiring a professional videographer or going out and buying your own video camera audio system. And I’m talking about Zoom, you know, the online video software that basically hosts and video records, audio records.
The whole virtual focus group. So let’s take it one step at a time. And [00:03:00] kind of how I think about the setup for a virtual focus group is one recruiting, we’ve got to advertise, we’ve got to recruit these people. Then I always think about communication. Meaning this kind of that lead up time before the focus group, then the focus group, and then a little bit about after.
So that’s kind of four different parts to setting up a virtual focus group. So let’s talk a little bit about recruiting. This is one of the most frequent questions that I get, which is where do you get these people? Where do you find all these people? So I’ve been using Craigslist for very, very long time to find in person.
And still use it to do virtual. So that is a good resource, depending on where you’re looking. You know, most of the Craigslist have a list for areas and, you know, easy to figure out. One of the things that has happened since probably the start of pandemic, but maybe before that, I just didn’t know, cause I wasn’t doing virtual focus groups, is that there are groups that will connect [00:04:00] your.
Craigslist posts to other websites and Facebook groups. So at times you may get bombarded your Austin, Texas. Craigslist posts may get bombarded with a bunch of people from California or New York or lots of other places. So. Just keep that in mind that you may have one ad in your location that will get several people from outside your region that are applying and that’s kind of why that happens.
They’ll pull those ads and put them into groups and put them in different posts or different websites so that other people can apply for them. Facebook is another place that you can totally advertise. You can create a free Facebook business page for your focus groups if you want to. Or I know there are a lot of firms where basically you, or if you have staff, they will join different groups that are on Facebook for jobs and basically kind of post a little something in there.
Hey, we’re doing these virtual focus groups. We just need folks to come in for three hours. Here’s the pay. You know, if you’re interested, [00:05:00] email this email. That’s another really great way to gain. people and it’s a free resource. It does take a little time to kind of build because you got to have several groups to make that kind of fruitful.
I’ve also used next door to advertise. I’ve paid for advertising on Facebook. I’ve also done online newspaper ads. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways to advertise. It just really kind of depends on if you’re looking for a group that is maybe outside of your city, if you’re trying to get people in Houston or maybe Seattle, like you may just want to research what’s in that area.
As far as job boards, some are free, some are not, and just kind of posting your ad up there and seeing what you get. Low bar, try Craigslist. It’s very easy. You write it in there. Sometimes they’re 20. Sometimes they’re 35. Sometimes they’re 45. Just depends on the city. Anyhow, that’s a great way. And inside your ad, Craigslist does not really want you to put an email address inside the ad.
So what I normally do when I am [00:06:00] recruiting is I use Google Forms to create a form that people just click a link and go and they fill out a form and then the results are saved in Google Drive. And, One of those forms is actually in the download that is going to be the show notes. So if you’re curious about that, setting up forms in Google drive is fairly easy.
It’s fairly intuitive. There are a couple snafus that can happen and frustrate people. That’s happened to me. And it’s just a couple of clicks. And Google makes it really easy to watch videos. If you want to do that, I’m happy to jump on a call to I’m going to do a zoom call and show you basically how ours are set up, but that’s kind of the part about recruiting is how are they going to contact you?
Do you want them to send an email somewhere? So got to have that email set up, right? Gmail has free accounts. So you can pay for an account. I wouldn’t suggest using a law firm email unless it doesn’t make a big difference. Or if you want to use a Google form, or if you maybe have a website [00:07:00] that has a form on it, either way, just try to think about how people are going to respond.
Okay. People are not likely to call, they’re really likely to send an email or fill out a form. Think like the most passive way, like, Oh man, click on this and fill out a form. Great. This is easy. Now I’ve applied and I can move on with life. So that’s kind of generally thinking about recruiting. Where are you going to recruit?
How are you going to advertise? How much do you want to spend? How are they going to sign up and what information do you want from them in order to kind of have them sign up? Name, email address. I don’t ask for people’s physical address. IS for email address. Sorry about that. That kind of information.
There’s all kinds of stuff you can use. Yvette, just again, think about if you give somebody 50 questions, they’re probably not gonna answer 50 questions. They’re probably gonna , just walk away. That’s too much information, too much trouble. They’re not gonna do it. And once you have them, right. So recruiting, that’s kind of part one.
Part two then is communicating with them. Again, thinking about having this extra email address, you can set one up for [00:08:00] free on Gmail, or you can pay 6 and set your own email address on there. That’s what I do. We’ll talk about kind of a little bit what I do after we finish our four steps. Cause you want to be able to communicate with these folks.
So they fill out the form, then you want to be able to communicate with them. Hey, you’re invited. Hey, here’s when it is. Hey, I need this like email is a really easy way. Do you ask people’s phone number? Of course you can call them. You can text them as well. All those ways are easy ways to communicate with people and highly suggested.
I love using Gmail because then you have the calendar. You can send a calendar invite for people that goes on their calendar. You know, they accept it or not. You can send reminders that you can even set up templates to make it really easy to just go in there and send reminders for everything. Okay. And on that step, getting a confidentiality agreement signed is another big part of communicating with them and having them sign it before they get the zoom link.
I do not like to give out a zoom link [00:09:00] until it’s the day of just, I don’t want to be zoom bombed. I don’t want it to leak out anywhere. So I don’t give the zoom link out until the day of, which gets cut a little short, but most people, if you’ve gone through the process of being recruited, like you’ve.
Gotten it inundated by emails and calendar invites and reminders because I just think that maybe that’s, you know, over communicating when they’re supposed to be there is more helpful than under communicating and getting those questions. Well, I didn’t know when it was on your calendar. So confidentiality.
Got to have that as a signature. So there are lots of really great electronic signature programs that do not require people to download the software. They just get it in the email and they click through. Of course, most of us have encountered DocuSign. I think almost everybody, most law firms at this point have figured out a way to do DocuSign for contracts.
So same thing. You just plug in that confidentiality form. Pick where you want them to sign and email it to them. I use Adobe because I already pay for the Adobe higher inversion so that I can do redactions and [00:10:00] things like that for the law firm. And then I found out like, Oh, they have their own electronic signature format.
So I already pay for it. So that’s the one that I use. It’s fairly simple, straightforward. And again, nobody has to download any kind of program for that. There’s hello sign. There’s many, many others. So think about that as far as confidentiality and getting electronic signature. Which then leads us to, so we’ve got recruit, communicate, and now we’re doing our focus group, right?
Our virtual focus group, and picking that platform. So there’s Zoom, there’s Google Meet, there’s Teams. I’m sure there are other platforms available out there that I don’t even know about. But you just want to pick a platform that you are very familiar with, and that has the capability of video recording, audio recording, and that people do not have to download.
So that’s one of the nice things about zoom and several other things. They don’t have to download it. Just send them a link. They click it and they join. I prefer zoom. It’s just basically kind of what I started with. And now we’re [00:11:00] down the road. And this is kind of what I use. I think it’s very easy.
There’s lots of great options. There are lots of settings to kind of get used to. Most of them are very straightforward. You know, you can record to a cloud, record to your laptop. There’s chatting. There’s polls. If you want to do polls, there’s lots of great ways to use zoom. So I enjoy zoom. That’s when I recommend, but that, you know, you want to make sure you set up, check all the settings.
Get a good to go, feel really comfortable with it because you’re going to have people that have done a zoom, but sometimes there are people who a weird problem happens and they don’t know how to change a setting. And I can try and troubleshoot, but most of them have to reschedule those people because.
We’re basically starting the zoom. I have people come in early so we can check all their technology. And then we start at a real specific, you know, 1230. So I open it up at 12 so people can start joining and check technology, check ID if you want to do that. And then we start right on time. But. [00:12:00] That’s the thing.
Like we end right on time as well. So if anything’s starting to kind of get in the way, Oh, there’s so much technology or, Oh, I can’t hear you. It’s like, Hey, I’m really sorry. We’re gonna have to reschedule. Cause we’ve got to go, we’ve got to get started at 1230. So either way, and you can always kick people out of zoom too.
So all that to be said, like you want to make sure that when you are. In your focus group, you are in it. You’re using it. You’re using all their time. You’re making sure they’re focused. You’re not losing people. The technology works. You know how to help people through that technology, freezing all that stuff.
So, and have all your share screen, all those little things. So anyhow, that’s like literally the virtual focus group. And then kind of last part, which would be the wrap up, which would be paying people. There’s all kinds of ways to pay people online, Zelle, PayPal, Venmo, cash app. I just pick one and go with it.
I only do one payment. I just do PayPal. I don’t do any other, there are no other options because it just, you can just spend off spending so much time on [00:13:00] that. And if you don’t have the app and it’s not linked up, PayPal seems to be totally fine. It’s also. Venmo. It’s the same company, but some people don’t want to use PayPal and that’s okay.
We tell people very up on the front in our ads on Craigslist and Facebook, Hey, we only use PayPal. That’s it. We don’t use any other way to get payment. So don’t ask. It ain’t available. And that helps again, cut, streamline things down for us. Cause we pay people in the last 15 minutes of the focus group so that when they’re leaving, I confirm with them on video, Hey, did you get your PayPal?
Then it’s recorded. Hey, I got my PayPal. Great. I haven’t had too many problems with PayPal or with people. Hey, I didn’t get my PayPal, you know, that kind of stuff. So it seems to have worked out really well as far as using that. Also you can do follow up. Of course, emails with people once they are done with the focus group.
Hey, do you have a good time? Hey, if you wanna recruit people, that’s a great way to do it. Send an email saying, Hey, if you had a good time, send somebody over. Have a referral [00:14:00] program. We have a referral program. If people send over a first name and an email and I can email that person and they actually show up and the referral gets a $10 electronic gift card.
Just little things like that to help. Kind of recruit other people is great. It’s a good way to find people. Not necessarily super cost effective, but one of the challenges about virtual is so easy not to show up is so easy for people just to say, ah, you know what? I just don’t want to do this today. So, uh, so you gotta have to think about over confirming like, Hey, you want to have eight people in here.
Yeah, you might need to think about having like 10 to 12 people confirmed just to make sure you have that eight people to show up. So that’s kind of the one of the drawbacks of virtual is some people don’t show up, which also means picking the day you have your virtual focus group on can have a heavy impact.
I don’t ever do them on Mondays just in case people had hard weekends. Doing them around holidays is also kind of a challenge. All [00:15:00] right. So let’s kind of go back through in our four parts and talk about thinking about this system, these four parts of your system and getting those in place and thinking through what is it, the technology that I need to do this, how much is it going to cost me and how much, of course, you’re going to pay people.
We talked about PayPal, how much you’re going to pay them. And playing with that, is it 20 an hour? Is it 25? Is it 30 an hour? Obviously, the more you pay, the more likely you’re going to get more people responding, which means you have to vet people more, you know, look through all those people. And then the other part of kind of this back end, this fourth step, is also just keeping a list of all these people.
So that you don’t have repeats or if you have bad participants, like letting know, like, Oh, this is a no, no, we have a no list around here. Maybe that person goes on the no list. You’re not going to do another one. And then also we kind of have a rolling, Hey, if it’s been six months or eight months, you can come back and participate again.
So that’s also helpful for you to track that. If you had some people that, you know, we’re good participants, they showed up on time. They stayed the whole time. They gave feedback. You want to keep [00:16:00] track of that. So thinking back through our system of recruiting, communication. Zoom, I mean, literally the focus group and then the aftermath, right?
Paying people and keeping track of people. Almost all these things are really inexpensive. Like I said, I would suggest using a free email address separate apart from your law firm. You can use a free one. You can pay 6 to get one from Google or from Gmail as well. If you want to set your own email address.
And then that’s going to help you, of course, communicate with them, do calendar invites, do reminders. You need to have some kind of technology to do electronic signatures for confidentiality. And then of course, some kind of platform for the actual virtual focus group that will do audio and video recording.
I use SuggestZoom and then of course, paying people, PayPal, Zelle, Cash App, whatever you choose, just go with it. It’s really nice because obviously you have a receipt for all that. All right. So of course, there’s like little fine tuning things that I would suggest, which is [00:17:00] Get this system in place and then do a test run.
So first couple of my focus groups, we had maybe three people, maybe three or four people, because we knew that we can have some glitches or some other stuff. So we had easy presentations. Cause again, we weren’t really sure how it was all going to work. So do a test runner too, and just get a few people in there.
If you want to use your office, you can do that, but that will help you get used How long does it take to do things? Meaning how long does it really take for people to return a confidentiality longer than you think? Also, those confidentiality emails can get stuck in spam or junk, which is another kind of thing.
So maybe send the confidentiality out the day before, you know, how are you going to vet people? How long is it going to take for you to pick people when they respond to a Craigslist ad or to a Facebook ad? And then zoom settings. I mean, there’s so many different ways to use zoom. There’s so many different settings, what works best, what doesn’t work best, how to save the chat, who needs to host, who doesn’t need to host.
[00:18:00] There’s lots of little kind of technical things that can happen if I’m not the host of a zoom, but I’m moderating and I tell everyone to chat all the answers to me privately when we close it out. Those may not save at all because it wasn’t to the host. So you want to make sure like, okay, who’s going to be the host, who’s going to be the moderator, save that chat, have that ability to save that chat.
So there’s lots of little settings on zoom, like I said. And then I always have someone else to help in my focus groups, whether it be either the other lawyer who’s doing it with me, or maybe a staff member that always helps to have a second set of eyes because. Maybe something happens. Oh gosh. Like, and somebody else has to jump off to go do the PayPal’s not working or, or something else.
So it’s always nice to have a second person. You don’t have to, I’ve definitely done them solo. And as long as most people are very patient, most of our participants are very patient. They get it. They’re not in a hurry. They’re getting paid fairly well to hang out with you. And they know that you’re going to end on time at three 30.
So it’s not like you’re going to be there all day with them. So. [00:19:00] Let me talk a little bit about how I run mine, how I do my backend. So to give you an idea, a little bit more about how my setup is. So I have a separate website altogether. I have a whole separate company. It’s called Advantage Focus Groups, and it has a website.
We have a Google email, you know, info at Advantage Focus Groups. The PayPal is all through Advantage Focus Groups. The Adobe is through Advantage Focus Group. There’s nothing law firm at all. Now, the confidentiality does mention a few things. We try not to say, Hey, you’re coming into a mock trial, unless we really are doing a mock trial, which again, most of the time you’re, I don’t use the virtual focus groups for that, but we do a Craigslist ad and we set up a Google form.
So people fill out a form. It collects name, email, telephone, marital status, kids, education, political affiliation, job. That’s really kind of about it. You may have like another one, like, [00:20:00] Hey, are you, we always ask people to, Hey, do you know that this focus groups in central time zone? Cause got people from coming all over.
You want to make sure they understand central time zone. And Hey, do you have a laptop, an internet connection and a tablet you can join like no cell phones. We kind of put that also in our, so just to double check, Hey, listen, we really don’t want you to join with a cell phone. It makes it really difficult for people to see the presentation on a cell phone.
Once they fill that out, then we go through and we start vetting, like who fits, who doesn’t fit. And we actually will call people as well, just to double check to make sure we’re getting a real life person that’s in the United States. That actually takes a little bit of time. So we try to have a pretty good lead out on most of our virtual focus groups, just so we can vet people.
And then we just start communicating with them. We email them reminders. We email them calendar invitations. I do my confidentiality. I do my Zoom link on the day of, and it can make things a little bit [00:21:00] hairy as far as coming down the line and having people show up, but that’s kind of how I know people are going to show up because we generally over confirm by two, three, four seats to make sure we have enough people to show up.
And then we just use the zoom and then pay with PayPal and then follow up with people and keep a list on Excel. You can keep a list in Gmail or G drive. That wouldn’t be very hard either. So that’s kind of a really large overview of the backend logistics for DIY virtual focus groups. Again, I will put a checklist, I’ll put the Google form, the confidentiality, all those things are going to be in a download in the show notes.
If you are interested to just have a little more information or just kind of an overview as well to have it all in one place. So if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me. My email will be in the show notes, or if you have additional questions about virtual focus groups, please let me know.
And thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate it. I hope that this two part series was helpful [00:22:00] for you and maybe encouraging you to do virtual focus groups for your cases and starting out to do that in your office. It’s really cost effective way to get feedback, doing it on your own. You don’t need a place.
It’s all virtual. So thanks again. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, share with a friend. Thank you.
