Impact Focus Groups: How To Organize Discussions About Your Solutions Journalism — And Why You Should

If you’re trying to better understand the impact of your solutions journalism, focus groups can offer invaluable qualitative insights.

Running focus groups before reporting can help you understand how your communities and your audience might define impact as well as aid you in determining the direction of reporting that would most resonate with them. This can provide crucial information for your impact hypothesis statement, which will shape how you track and measure impact. Holding focus groups after stories have been produced can uncover how your communities and your audience understand your stories and what they mean to them.

This guide will help you prepare, run and analyze the results of a focus group to plan or capture the impact of your reporting.