Congratulations to Revelation customers Kristin Schwitzer of Beacon Research and Dana Slaughter of Slaughter Branding! Their work with the Arnold Agency  agency in New York in partnership with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network has won the Ad Council's award for best public service advertising campaign. Entitled "Think Before You Speak," the messaging was designed to discourage use of the slur "That's so gay" by school students.

Kristin and Dana used Revelationto test print, TV, and outdoor concepts and their work was intstrumental to honing the campaign. Read more about the campaign here.

Revelation's CEO to Speak at Advertising Research Foundation's 2009 Conference: How Online Qualitative Rescues Research From Shrinking Budgets

CEO Steve August will discuss how Qualitative 2.0 affords market researchers the speed, value and reach they need in this time of shrinking budgets.

Portland, Ore. - March 23, 2009 - Today, Revelation, a developer of next generation online qualitative research tools, announced CEO Steve August will speak at the 2009 re:think Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) convention.  Mr. August is scheduled to talk on the subject of Qualitative 2.0: Speed, Reach and Richness on March 30th at noon.

Held at the Marriott Marquis in New York City, this annual convention draws over 2,000 advertising and marketing professionals.

August's thirty-minute free talk will use real life qualitative research case studies to show how online research techniques dramatically accelerate qualitative research that produces insight, fuels powerful creative, and allows users to quickly evaluate campaigns.

One case study that will be discussed is a project for the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). This research study was nominated for an Ogilvy Award, an accolade administered by the ARF. August will present the study's design, show how online qualitative research aided in collecting insight, and the resulting campaign for the Ad Council. Kristin Schwitzer, president of Beacon Research was nominated for the award, working with Arnold Worldwide ETC. on the research for the Ad Council's "Think Before You Speak" ad campaign using Revelation's online research tool.

"Web 2.0 -- and the underlining technology-- has given researchers unimaginable access across populations, time zones, and geography to gather consumer behavior data. The tool's power also befits the current economic climate. Compared to traditional focus groups or in-depth interviews, a license is a fraction of the cost but yields richer data, in half the time of in-person activities," says August. Quite often, researchers are fighting the clock and feeling pressure to reduce budgets, often at the expense of insight. Now, Revelation addresses those concerns, and over-delivers on the data.

For a pass to hear the speech at the Marriott Marquis, 535 Broadway, 6th Floor (Plymouth/Royale Room), NYC  on March 30, 2009 at noon, visit www.revelationglobal.com/arf.

Submitted by Steve on Thu, 2009-03-26 19:47.

Activities are a key concept and feature in Revelation-based studies. Activities serve as the conduit for getting the information you want from your participants, understanding participant behaviors, experiences and emotions. The more engaging and efficient you can make your activities, the more you gain from you participants. Every month we feature useful activity to use in Revelation projects.

This month we are going to focus on Designer activities. In these activities, we ask participants to step into the role of a designer and create their ideal phone, computer, shopping experience or whatever makes sense for the objective of the study. Often with designer activities, the take away for the research team  isn't  the specific ideas submitted by participants (some of which may be nonviable), but to tease out the underlying motivations for the suggestions. As the folks at Ideas to Go say, "We are looking for what people are for." 

The trick with designer activities is to set them up so that participants are free from most constraints (budget, space, time), yet give them a good amount of structure to guide them through the exercise. Here's an example of a store designer exercise (the blanks are where you would put the item being shopped for):

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Submitted by Steve on Wed, 2009-02-25 23:00.

One of the key concepts and features in Revelation is Activities. Activities serve as the conduit for getting the information you want from your participants, understanding participant behaviors, experiences and emotions. Every month we will feature an especially useful activity.

This month we are going to focus on a great activity for capturing participant behaviors. Behavioral activities tend to be diaries or journals where participants record what they did at a given time. The challenge with behavioral activities is making sure participants capture what you want them to, and preventing the activities from getting dull and repetitive.  We have a great activity for capturing behaviors, it's called 'Moments' and it can make diaries a lot more fun and engaging. 

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You have asked. You have waited. And now your wait is over. On Sunday, January 18th we posted our latest release which is entirely devoted to group discussion. You can now have  your cake and eat it to. Revelation will fully support all the great in-depth activities it does currently, AND give you  the features of a bulletin board style group discussion. No need to use one system for in-depths and another for bulletin board groups. You can do them both in Revelation. We think this marks the start of something new and big.

Submitted by Steve on Tue, 2009-01-27 01:38.

With the release of our new group discussion activity here, we have been thinking quite a bit about online group interaction and its best uses. When qualitative came first came online, the idea was simply to replicating focus groups. The assumption was that group interaction was the whole idea of online qual. But from our point of view, as Web 1.0 evolved into Web 2.0, it became clear that the online medium is actually more effective at one on one in-depth qual then group interaction, at least in the context of online qualitative research. The ability to capture individual experiences on a vast scale in a short amount of time seems to be the true killer app of online qual.  And understanding human experiences in the context of a business question is really the mission of qualitative market research.

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Submitted by Steve on Tue, 2009-01-06 01:50.

Welcome to 2009! Tomorrow, we will be having our first online Immersive Research class of the year (with more to follow later in the year).  One of the things I like to impress upon folks who are new to online qualitative research that online is not a methodology - it's a medium for research - just like in person is a medium. I think this is an important distinction because it frames the approach in a very different way. The online medium can support a variety of methodologies and techniques (diaries, projectives, discussions etc). Just like in person, it has strengths, weaknesses and burgeoning conventions.

Online as a medium is really strong in terms of being able to sustain interaction and engagment over time. It's also a medium where you can move from individual and group interactions at will depending on how it best serves your research.  And I believe that it's also a very good expressive reflective medium for participants.  In many studies participants comment on how much they learned about themselves.

So I am excited to guide the class through the possibilities of this new medium - and look forward to the new things I will learn from them as well.

This Research World article, originally published in November 2008, puts forth an immersive research study and explains how the technologies associated with Web 2.0 usher in new data in online qualitative market research. The article was written by Revelation CEO Steve August.

Revelation, a developer of online qualitative research tools, has tapped the potential of Web 2.0 and today introduces Revelation PROJECT v2. Researchers now have the unprecedented power to see through customers' eyes and gain a deeper understanding of how, when, why and where they use today's products and services.

In the past, researchers were limited by one-time interactions with respondents - those who participated in a focus group for a short time or those who submitted to in-home studies. Now, the technology that underlies the Web 2.0 phenomenon - broadband connectivity, social software, ubiquitous digital media and wireless devices such as cell phones - has changed the fundamental paradigm of limited, unsustainable access to human experiences.

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