Partner
Sanctuary for Sustainable Artistry
Area of Impact
Urban Innovation
Service(s)
Customer Research
Situation
Sanctuary for Sustainable Artistry is a nonprofit that works with retail property owners to offer micro spaces to very small businesses, focused on underrepresented business owners in food services and art. As they worked to growing their new organization, they needed to further understand the property owners they targeted for partnership.
Task
Source and connect with retail property owners to learn three key insights:
What do commercial property owners say are their biggest problems and opportunity areas?
What are their reactions to the problem statement & strategy?
What words, phrases, and concepts do they use when describing their work and sharing feedback?
Process
orientation on SFSA
In an interactive session, Sanctuary for Sustainable Artistry gave me an overview of the organization, their mission and theory of change, their target problem statement and how they describe their solution to it. We talked about what they needed to learn about property owners in the project.
Alignment on research goals
After that discussion I put together a proposal outlining the research plan and goals in writing. SFSA approved of the plan and gave recommendations for how to navigate finding the right people to complete the research.
Online survey
I created an online survey designed to get the most information with the least effort required from survey respondents.
initial check in
Reviewed results, shared initial insights, followed up on open questions
research summary deck
I created a deck that included the research goals & methodology, summarized responses, and outline insights and opportunities.
Outcome
Sanctuary for Sustainable Artistry left the engagement with six high level insights and associated recommendations on how to best engage and speak to their target customers. The recommendations were immediately used to improve grant proposals, website language, digital content and verbal interactions with property owners.
From the Partner
“Alexis is truly brilliant in engaging with research respondents and developing messaging that propels our mission. She is self-guided and adapted to expectations expressed by our team, leveraging our thinking and goals to weave together measurable outcomes.
Alexis’ work has led to commitments from donors and new partnership engagements for us. She represents a skillset and driven attitude very much needed in the impact nonprofit world.”
Miles Dotson | Founder and Director at Sanctuary for Sustainable Artistry