Beyond the city: Finding rural participants for UX research.

Australia's population is mostly clustered in big cities, and that can make it hard to find people for specialised research, especially in a state as big as Queensland.

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We recently wrapped up a project for the state government that really drove this point home. We needed to find 20 landowners in Queensland, both rural and city-based, each with properties bigger than 2 hectares. We needed their input to create a Mental Model Map, which would show how these folks think about and interact with the state government service we were researching.

From the start, we knew finding these people would be a challenge. Queensland is huge, and a lot of the people we were looking for aren’t in market research databases or active on social media. We also had to be careful to balance rural and city participants to make sure we were hearing from people all over Queensland. To tackle this challenge, we came up with a plan that tried to address all our potential challenges:

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What we did

1. Our client used their customer contact lists and shared them with us.
   • They also handed out flyers at events.
   • And reached out to people they had regular contact with.
2. We teamed up with Farron Research, a market research recruitment agency and worked with our client to find as many participants as possible. Farron used contact lists from our client and their own database to:
   • Send emails to potential participants.
   • Cold call possible candidates.
   • Reach out to partners in the industry.
3. We didn't stop there - we also tried some personal approaches:
   • Posted about the study on our own social media.
   • Sent digital flyers to people we know.
   • Told our family and friends about it.
   • Asked participants to spread the word.

Even with all this effort, we only managed to get 16 of the 20 participants we were aiming for. It was enough for the study, but we were surprised we couldn't find more people, given how hard we tried. In the end, 44% of our participants were from rural areas and 56% were from cities.

This whole experience really showed us how tricky it can be to do research in Queensland, especially when you're looking for specific types of people who aren't always easy to reach online. It also taught us how important it is to have a variety of recruitment strategies and to be flexible with our research plans.

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Learnings

Things we would do next time we have to recruit rural participants:

1. Starting recruitment as early as possible - Reaching rural participants takes time as there are some people who can’t or choose not to interact with social media. If they use social media almost every rural community will have some sort of Facebook group as a local notice board.
2. Use various channels to create a list of potential participants such as:
   • Advertising in local newspapers.
   • Local TV ads.
   • Local radio station/s.
   • Letter drops / flyers in local areas.
   • Local Facebook pages.
   • Work with other organisation to get the word out.
3. Let people spread the word - Once a topic is in the community, people talk. Despite them being kilometres apart, word of mouth is still a strong communication channel for the rural communities.

While recruitment may take longer, you'll gain access to a wider range of rural perspectives and increase participation from those eager to contribute their valuable insights.