When people think of public opinion research, surveys typically first come to mind. Surveys can be used to understand the political environment, inform message development, or make adjustments to a communication strategy. For every project, we build a custom methodology to suit your needs—online, live calls, text, or a mix—and pay careful attention to demographics and response rates because accuracy matters.

Focus groups get personal in a way a survey simply can’t—letting us hear respondents in their own words and see their reactions in real time, which is especially important when showing creative concepts or news stories. Our focus groups are led by senior staff, and we have seasoned moderators to lead groups with AAPI, Black, and Hispanic voters (in English or Spanish).

Read more on our groups here.

Multivariate analysis allows us to dig deeper and uncover patterns participants may not be able to articulate themselves. For example, regression analysis can identify the strongest drivers behind a candidate or policy’s support or MaxDiff analysis can tell us the best way to talk about a candidate or approach an issue from a clear ranking of messages or policies through a series of forced-choice questions.

Discussion boards (imagine the format of NextDoor) allow people to answer questions at their leisure over a few days. This flexible format allows more time with participants, geographic diversity, and requesting tasks like web searches or responding to stimuli.

Testing the language of a message in a poll is essential, but of course the creative execution matters too. Online ad testing allows us to examine post-ad movement, and important metrics like believability, confusion, and voter mobilization.

Sometimes we want our research to make news and change the dialogue. We are always happy to amplify results by leading conversations with donors, allies, or the press, even if that means producing a separate shorter analysis or other collateral.