Terawatt: Market Intelligence Survey Design Case Study
Terawatt is an online marketplace that makes expert career coaching affordable for all employees in a company - not just the C-suite. The tools and resources at Terawatt make it possible for organizations to create coaching programs that upskill and provide additional benefits to their employees.
When Terawatt initially approached Insight Lime in 2020, they were looking for an expert statistician to create an annual survey that would serve as market intelligence in the professional development space and provide sales + marketing collateral.
The founder, Francie, wanted to make sure that Terawatt was presenting scientifically sound data that she could confidently use to educate HR professionals at target organizations on the benefit of professional development programs and career coaching as a whole
“Insight Lime creates surveys for my company that make us seem far smarter, bigger and more accomplished than we are. We started the survey as a sales tool, but it has become an incredible talking point that gives us so much authority an an expert. Just far surpassed what I expected.”
When looking for results they could rely on, Terawatt made the right move and leveraged the survey design professionals at Insight Lime.
Survey design is both an art and a science. Removing as much bias as possible from your question phrasing, asking the right questions to answer your business goals, and selecting and purchasing a reliable audience can be a big task - one that Insight Lime is specially equipped to take on!
We specialize in both delivering consumer insights through surveys and data storytelling. This means we use scientifically-sound measures for designing our surveys and selecting an unbiased audience and we also can highlight how the data can be used for businesses decisions (or in the case of Terawatt, sales collateral).
Not only did Terawatt work with Insight Lime to produce a survey, but the 2021 Professional Development Survey by Terawatt was also the basis of the majority of the company’s marketing materials and PR for the following year, and, Terawatt has leveraged Insight Lime to develop the 2022 Professional Development Survey as well.
The Results
Terawatt went on to speak at the HR Tech Symposium by HR.com about the results of the annual survey and the importance of ERGs and BRGs (specialized employee groups that support underrepresented groups)
Terawatt was able to create additional marketing materials all from the same survey and solidify their value propositions from the survey data
The survey has been referenced by other professionals in the field, leveraging their data and insights (Terawatt is now positioned as an industry expert, which was one of the survey’s goals!)
The Process
Surveys can be tricky projects to manage - the way that Insight Lime sets clients up for success is by having a clear project outline and agreeing on a success statement.
We relentlessly pursue the survey goal and make sure we all stay on task while providing a clear timeline for survey development.
Goal definition: We sat down with Terawatt and discussed ideal outcomes from the survey. We learned they wanted to have something that could be used for sales collateral, as a lead magnet, and also could validate/check some of the theories they had about the current state of the professional development industry.
Audience research: Getting a large sample size of qualified respondents can be difficult and costly if you don't have a sizable opted-in user base of your own. We worked together to define the ideal target audience. Insight Lime provided our expertise on different audience platforms to come up with a recommendation - Terawatt leveraged Pollfish, as the platform has more granular options for audience definition than many other audience partners.
Question Validation & User Research - At Insight Lime, we often add a step to our surveys to validate that questions are phrased so that the audience will understand - we do user research before our user research! This takes the form of audience interviews and a test survey. The test survey includes more open-ended questions and we then code the answers to find the best way to phrase multiple-choice options.
Analyze Results - For Terawatt, we ran two surveys, focusing on employers and employees. That way, we could look at overall sentiments and see if there was a match (or mismatch) on how professional development resources were interpreted.
The final lead magnet deliverable was created with guidance in copy and visualizations from Insight Lime, and with a 3rd party designer.
You can download the full 2020 Terawatt survey on their website. The main takeaway was that employees rated programs as a significant benefit to their job satisfaction. There is a huge variety of opinions on how a program should be set up. Some employees want a stipend; others want a clearly laid out program for them to follow.
More surprisingly, we found a difference between how men and women responded - women were overall less satisfied with professional development programs than men.
That insight created a lot of discussion between our two teams. Were women not being served the same opportunities for professional development as men?
The survey results were so interesting that we are already working with Terawatt on their 2022 survey, which will dive deeper into both the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on professional development programs and the opinions of underrepresented groups. In the future, Terawatt has a vision of running a longitudinal study following companies over the years to understand the growth of their professional development programs and the opinions of their employees.
(If you’re interested in being part of their study, you can contact Terawatt here!)
Conclusion
Creating a survey that Terawatt could base their marketing, sales, and positioning on meant that the young company had an opportunity to meet multiple objectives with one project - pretty cost-effective, we think!
We are delighted to work with a company dedicated to fighting racism and improving educational resources in organizations. We can’t wait to see the success they will have in the space.