Recruiting and Engaging Diverse Audiences for Government Research

The US government has historically lagged behind industry in its ability to implement modern best practices in technology and design for diverse audiences. This is particularly true with respect to customer experience understanding and adapting to user needs. This said, the current administration has leaned into this gap in 2022, in response to the shifts that began previously within the more innovative hotspots of government (White House ODS, CFPB, The Lab at OPM, 18F, PIFs, USDS, US Digital Response, to name a few). The Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government, issued not quite a year ago, notes:

Unfortunately, acknowledgement and commitment to resolving this gap is only the beginning. As our government responds to the call and increasingly shifts toward designing and delivering services in a manner that people of all abilities can navigate, it must also work to understand the needs of the full diversity of its audiences. 

At Coforma, this is something we care deeply about doing well ourselves, for some of the very same reasons. In this piece, I’ll share just some of our recommendations for thoughtfully recruiting and engaging representative audiences in government research. I hope that this will aid those in government building in-house research teams while also being a resource to those finding and assessing vendors who aim to support in doing this work. Let’s discuss the top six recommendations for recruiting and engaging diverse audiences for government research.

Recommendation 1: Build or Hire a Diverse Research Team

Form representative research teams with cultural literacy, competence, and responsiveness.

Wherever possible, your research team should include those with lived experiences and identities rooted in the communities that will be impacted by your work. This will often help the research team better challenge assumptions they may hold as well as develop more culturally appropriate, rich, and responsive ways of working. Do not expect these individuals, especially if they’re in the minority within a team, to speak on behalf of the communities with which you’re engaging.

It’s also important to establish a research team that includes those with experience thoughtfully engaging with and empowering relevant communities, regardless of their own lived experiences and identities. To name a few examples, this might show up as experience recruiting across low-income demographics, utilizing trauma-informed research practices, engaging people that experience a technical or digital divide, or creating inclusive research for individuals with various types of disabilities or other needs that may call for accommodations or finessed approaches.

Ensuring you’ve built a research team that can appropriately engage with the diverse communities that you aim to serve starts with thoughtful talent sourcing and hiring, or contractor vetting. Whichever way a team is being built, in order to ensure these marks are hit throughout the process, job descriptions or requests for proposals should be thoughtfully crafted to value diverse skills and experiences as much as the desired outcomes. 

Hiring teams should also engage with the communities they intend to research to encourage them to share related proposals and job descriptions or apply themselves. The hiring or contracts team should also be fully briefed on the goals and prepared to seek out a variety of experiences beyond their own.

What else should contract or hiring teams look for? The following recommendations build on this start.

Recommendation 2: Understand the Existing Structural Barriers to Research Participation

Acknowledge the structural barriers to research participation, address them, and work to restore connection.

Are folks reluctant to participate in your research due to institutional or historic issues that have left fear, frustration, or distrust? Rather than ignore that or fight a symptom of a potentially long-standing problem, have your research team directly name the barrier (for example, racism or discrimination) and address it in how the work will be conducted. Take time to note the steps that will be taken to help restore safety, confidence, privacy, and trust. When you implement this in your project or program, it can also initiate positive ripple effects that improve wider community relations. 

Unfortunately, there are many institutional and historical issues that may make recruiting difficult across a wide variety of important constituencies to the government. Consider the many veterans and their families who may have lost faith in the US Department of Veterans Affairs due to their past backlog in claims and the way that impacted their health and livelihoods. Think about the ways in which mistreatment of the LGBTQI+ community by the US military through policies like “don’t ask, don’t tell” created a culture of secrecy that today can obscure the challenges queer service members and veterans need support when addressing. 

Consider still those American Indian and Alaska Native communities whose family narratives include documentation of the US government’s broken promises, coerced signatures, and even the forced sterilization of their people over the years. How much natural reluctance to participate must that create? And there’s the forcible relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans in US internment camps. Then there are middle eastern Americans who have taken individual and community backlash from our country’s approaches to combating terrorism.

Each of these issues, and so many others, can be deeply embedded within a community’s consciousness and collective memory. They’re also valid and active barriers to engagement and participation with the government where it could otherwise make a positive difference. 

But we have to be clear, the burden is not on the communities to suddenly trust the government, but on the government to prove itself, on a case-by-case basis, trustworthy and dedicated to understanding and serving their needs well.

When these barriers are identified and known, it’s also possible to make plans to build the staffing of the team—back to recommendation 1—to ensure appropriate cultural literacy, competence, and responsiveness, or to provide specific training to support this effort. This is an important step to consider as you seek to implement the next recommendation.

Recommendation 3: Meet People Where They Are—Across the Digital Divide

Acknowledge and address technology as a possible barrier to research participation.

One way to begin to mitigate the institutional, systemic, or cultural barriers that exist between government and community is to center engagement with participants around how and where they work, live, or otherwise operate. This is true for research recruitment and for research engagement, and whether it’s being facilitated within physical proximity or through digital means—as has been increasingly popular due to the global pandemic and the higher costs for onsite engagements.

To recruit and engage truly diverse audiences, your team should be keenly aware of the technical limitations your participants may be facing. This includes developing a self-awareness about the limitations that utilizing a technology-driven approach might create. 

As popular and almost default as digital approaches may seem in 2022, I recommend not relying solely on technologies or internet access and reliability for recruitment and engagement. What audiences might a print ad reach to recruit participants that a digital ad would not? What audiences might be able to share important insights through a phone interview, who might not be able to navigate a web-based video interview? 

With these examples in mind, remember that it’s still important to offer in-person, physical, and other alternatives to digital research recruitment and participation. This is true particularly if your team hasn’t spent time to build up practices around where to (and where not to) lean on digital or technology-based approaches. If digital or online participation is a necessity, I’d recommend offering and preparing appropriate accommodations and/or training for those who are newer adopters of the technologies being used. 

Either way, it’s the responsibility of the government to help bridge the digital divide and seek to build the sort of connections that the next recommendation suggests.

Recommendation 4: Meet People Where They Are—In Trusted Relationships And Communities 

Pay respect and thoughtfully ease into community spaces where you’re welcomed in.

As mentioned for recommendation 3, it’s essential to center engagement with participants around how and where they work, live, or otherwise operate. Beyond technical considerations, go where relevant conversations are happening, involving individuals you wish to learn from, and build on the culture of trust and understanding that’s been established, rather than attempting to quickly replicate and build such a community from scratch. 

Begin with identification. To learn where relevant conversations are happening, perform market research and conduct social listening early on. There should be an emphasis on finding spaces that exhibit trust and a sense of community amongst themselves. It can also be helpful to identify community leaders who are visibly ready for engagement with government and government change. 

Listen to understand. Once you find these spaces and identify these leaders, we recommend taking time to listen and study their public comments. Aim to learn their perspectives and from their experiences with minimal disruption. If an identified community is private, limiting your ability to listen, consider reaching out to an organizer or facilitator of the space to share your mission and intent, acknowledging any possible barriers as mentioned in recommendation 2, and asking for permission to join and witness the community. Be prepared, some may choose not to give you access, which is their right.

Ask to participate. Eventually, once initial seeds of trust have been established, you can ask for temporary, contextualized invitations to participate within those groups. It may be beneficial to ask for the partnership of a group’s trusted facilitators to support your effort of research recruitment, community engagement strategies, and more. At Coforma, we have found that relationships with community leaders are invaluable resources. Due to their own experiences built up over time, facilitators of long-standing groups can provide practical advice on research recruitment and engagement tactics, such as how to increase response rates, within their communities.

Make it about them, always. The antithesis of this recommendation is creating new forums, social hashtags, and pseudo movements, making people come to you and learn your ways in order to engage. The US government has a bad reputation of using its authority to force communities to do the work to come to them in order to receive help. Because of this, efforts by the government to meet people where they are can be received like a breath of fresh air. It can be seen as a sign of appreciation of community experience, expertise, time, community and/or culture, and hosting of space. 

Still, for all of this to come together well, you will have to give the effort enough time, as the next recommendation outlines.

Recommendation 5: Provide Enough Time for Effective Recruitment

Invest time in research recruitment to enable inclusive participation.

When recruitment is shortchanged in project timelines, representation and inclusion are often the first things to fall to the wayside. In these instances, teams will often rely more heavily on their connections, direct networks, and assumptions about what is an appropriate research pool, and their efforts fall short of equitable. Especially in instances when a research team is not adequately representative of the population itself—see recommendation 1—this can become a cyclical issue.

As noted in recommendation 4, building relationships with communities can take time and often require phases of preparation and relationship building in order to build enough trust and understanding to support a dynamic research relationship. Research plans should factor in the necessary time to ensure the communities with the most structural barriers to engagement—see recommendation 2—aren’t excluded.

When time runs short on recruitment, it’s also common for the type of engagement to become weak, and therefore less informative. For example, relying heavily on answers to direct questions in interviews or surveys, and removing time for wider discussions and participatory engagement. This not only weakens the findings, but also reinforces mistrust and fails to adjust the power dynamic that makes historically marginalized communities reluctant to participate in research with the government in the first place.

Time is an important factor of research success, and it’s enabled in part by the next recommendation.

Recommendation 6: Establish An Adequate Recruitment Budget And Strategy

Pay research participants and invest in research recruitment to demonstrate respect and value for their contributions.

As Coforma has talked about before, it’s most ethical for the government to pay research participants for their time. This is a way to ensure that some of the most disadvantaged individuals and communities are able to afford to spend time sharing their insights, which also ensures that the government gets and is able to benefit from the knowledge of those insights. Importantly, this is also a signal to those participating that what they’re sharing is of value (which it really is) while also showing appropriate respect and appreciation for the time and labor they’re taking to share it with you.

Thoughtful research budgets may also allow funding for community leaders or communities who lend their expertise, platform, and time to help ensure successful and diverse recruitment. As mentioned in recommendation 4, community leaders can be tremendous and invaluable partners to a research team. Paying for services received through a recruitment and/or research partnership can help ensure the longevity of disadvantaged communities over time. It can also help ensure the relationship is based on mutual benefit and an ethical grounding that avoids exploitation.

And in alignment with paying for time, sometimes the best or only way to reach the audiences that you need to will require paid promotion, which means a budget for advertising—print and/or digital—may also be necessary. This can help break the barrier across geographic, economic, social, and cultural divides. 

Put These to Action 

By leveraging our recommendations, the government can recruit and engage diverse audiences to support their essential research into improving services

Research is essential as the US government shifts toward designing and delivering services in a manner that people of all abilities, backgrounds, and resources can navigate. It’s the work to both understand the needs of the full diversity of people within the US as well as the work to ensure the tools and services the government is providing adequately meet those needs. And it’s only successful after investing the time and energy into thoughtfully recruiting and engaging a diverse audience for research. 

Doing that takes: forming representative research teams with cultural literacy, competence, and responsiveness; acknowledging the structural barriers to research participation, addressing them, and working to restore connection; acknowledging and addressing technology as a possible barrier to research participation; thoughtfully easing into community spaces where you’re welcomed in; investing time in research recruitment to enable inclusive participation; and paying research participants and investing in research recruitment to demonstrate respect and value for their contributions.

Whether this recruitment and research is being led in-house from within a government entity or through a vendor, when applied, the recommendations provided here can support the mandate of improving government services and technologies by making them more accessible, easy to use, equitable, transparent, and responsive to the needs of all people of the United States.