#007 – 2007 Autumn

This issue of Tribal Voice is a double feature article edition, with articles on entrepreneurialism and online survey completion.

Three Steps to Being More Entrepreneurial at Work outlines ways to help you identify new business opportunities and turn them into reality, no matter what your employment situation is.

Complete The FRANK Team’s Entrepreneurship Survey (open to anyone 35 or younger) to receive another article about being entrepreneurial.

Online Survey Completion reveals the many ways you can help prevent participants dropping out of your online survey, and what to expect in terms of completion rates.

The Innovation Update reports on the recent Innovation Report Launch, and provides a link to innovation tips for enhancing creativity in your organisation.

Finally, we invite you to come to our next workshop, Utilising Data.

Happy reading!

Kate Tribe
ask@triberesearch.com.au
T | +61 2 9264 4432

Tribe Research News

Utilising Data [you didn't know you had]

Tribal know how banner

Did you read about customer segmentation in our last edition of Tribal Voice? Not sure where to start?

Come to our May workshop, learn how to segment your contacts and grow in 2007.

The workshop will cover:

• What important data you have already collected
• How you can use this data to build a profile of your clients, businesses and competitors
• How to implement a customer / market segmentation model
• What data you can begin to collect so that you can further build your customer and business profile

Innovation Update

The Innovation Report 2007 was successfully launched on the 3rd of April. The report identifies Organisational Culture as the area of innovation needing most improvement in Australian organisations.

For tips on how to build a more creative culture in your own organisation, read our article published in the ABN Networker:

Why Your Work Culture Could Be Your Biggest Barrier to Innovation

More information on the Innovation Report and order forms are available here.

Feature Article 1

Three Steps to Being More Entrepreneurial at Work

An entrepreneur is someone who recognises an opportunity to create value and acts on this opportunity.

Using this broad definition, an entrepreneur could include someone who continually starts new business ventures, or someone who is employed but takes the initiative to start something new within their existing business (also known as an intrapreneur).

So whether you consider yourself to be an employee, manager, business owner, contractor or self employed, you have the potential to be more entrepreneurial within your current employment situation.

But how do you go about finding these opportunities and making them happen? Here are three steps to get started.

Step 1. Network

You’ve probably heard it many times before, but networking really is a key factor in identifying new opportunities and making your ideas happen. The more people you meet and keep in contact with, the more likely it is you will hear about new developments, new players and potential partners in your industry. It also increases your chances of meeting like-minded people to support or become involved in your ideas. If you keep this in mind, you will find there are networking opportunities everywhere:

Organisation Contacts
Whether you work in a large corporation, nonprofit organisation, government department or small business, any existing organisation has many potential contacts. This includes lower level staff, colleagues, superiors, people in different departments, suppliers and other business associates. Even if they don’t seem to have much in common with you on the surface, they probably have many interests outside of their defined role, or maybe they know someone else who could help make your idea a reality.

Industry Events
Industry related events like awards nights, continuing education, marketing promotions and product launches are a great opportunity to meet people outside of your organisation who have an interest in the same general area. While you don’t want to give ideas away to direct competitors, it is a good chance to identify potential alliances with those who have different service offerings to yours.

Personal Contacts
Find out the backgrounds of people your family and friends know or work with, and ask them to introduce you if they identify a potential partner who could help you with a new venture or internal opportunity.

Networking Groups
Finally, there are numerous networking groups, with the specific aim of providing their members with opportunities to network with like-minded people. These are a great way to improve your networking skills and become more confident in promoting your work and ideas. Professional associations and other industry-specific organisations can also provide these types of opportunities. The key is to find a networking group that attracts the sort of people you want to meet – you may need to try a few before deciding which ones are giving you the most benefit.

For example, if you are interested in meeting other entrepreneurs in Sydney, how about joining us at a networking event we support:

Last Thursday Club (LTC) is a monthly networking event in Sydney for creative businesspeople; entrepreneurs, innovators, business leaders, idea-makers and thought-leaders. If you think outside the square (or would like to!) you’ll love LTC.

Next event 31 May:

• Pitch Doctor, Neil Flett; Director of RogenSi, author of the pitching bible “Pitch Doctor”, and mastermind of Sydney’s successful Olympics bid (among others)
• Copywriter/trainer, Paul Jones; Highly-experienced copywriter and dynamic trainer, Paul will share secrets of selling yourself on paper

Step 2. Educate Yourself

To really understand whether a potential opportunity is viable and how to establish it successfully, you need to educate yourself. As well as a specific assessment of the opportunity, you also need to develop your general business skills.

Specific Opportunities
Once you have identified a new opportunity, you need to assess the situation and decide whether it is worth pursuing. A simple way to start is to research the internal and external context in order to conduct an objective SWOT analysis for your idea:

• Strengths – What are the strengths of this idea in relation to your internal resources? Eg: you have expertise in area, potential alliances identified
• Weaknesses – What are the weaknesses of the idea in relation to your internal resources? Eg: high start up capital required, opposition from superiors
• Opportunities – What external opportunities support the idea? Eg: no competitors, high market demand
• Threats – What external threats are there for the idea? Eg: competitors with greater advertising resources, target demographic is fickle in their interests

This can be particularly useful if you are trying to decide between several options.

General Business Skills
Developing your general business skills and experience will increase your success in picking the most viable opportunities to pursue, getting the right people involved and taking the best approach to setting up and developing the new venture. For example, a recent survey of Australian Businesswomens Network members identified the following business skills as the ones they [mostly business owners] most wanted to develop:

• Financial
• Networking
• Marketing
• Planning / systems

The best way to develop these types of skills is to continually learn through training and development programs. If employed, investigate what training options are available to you through your organisation, and make the time to access them. If you are self employed or want more skill development than your employer offers, consider joining professional, industry or general business associations – they often offer discounted programs to members, as well as the benefits of networking outlined above.

Step 3. Find A Mentor

A mentor is someone you can ask for information and advice in relation to your career and new opportunities you want to pursue. They are usually more experienced business people.

What are the benefits?

• They can give you a valuable external perspective on your situation, which may be more objective than your own assessment
• A second opinion may pick up threats or opportunities you overlooked
• You can draw on similar experiences / situations they have encountered
• They might know an easier way to establish your idea
• They can refer you to resources you might not have known about
• They can help with the areas you are not as strong in (see general business skills above)

How do you find a mentor?

• It could be someone you already know – a family member, friend, former or current employer, manager or business associate. Anyone you feel you can talk to about your ideas and new ventures.
• You could meet a potential mentor through networking both inside and outside of your organisation.
• Alternatively, you could undertake a business development program where you are assigned a formal mentor, eg: The Department of State and Regional Development offer a range of mentoring programs, including the Women in Business Mentoring Program for businesswomen who have been in business for up to 2 years. Kate was a mentoree in this program and is now a mentor.
• You don’t have to have one mentor to rely on for advice about everything – you might know several people in different fields who can give you advice in different areas, eg: legal, financial, marketing.

Conclusion
By networking, educating yourself and using mentors, anyone can set themselves up to be more entrepreneurial. It’s all about having the right contacts, knowledge and skills so you can recognise opportunities to create value and take action to develop something new.

Entrepreneurship Survey
Now that you know how to unleash your inner entrepreneur, we invite you to take part in The FRANK Team’s Entrepreneurship Survey (open to anyone 35 or younger). Even if you don’t have an interest in being an entrepreneur, your participation will provide us with a valuable insight into the work lives of young Australians.

Participants will be sent an article on being entrepreneurial in return for completing the survey. Click here to access the Entrepreneurship Survey.

Feature Article 2

Online Survey Completion

Online surveys are becoming one of the most important and widely used methods in a researcher’s toolkit. However, unlike telephone surveys, online surveys are done with no supervision from those conducting the research. As a result of the self-administration of the survey, one of the key problems faced by researchers is ensuring that once a respondent clicks on the link to begin a survey, they actually finish the survey.

Why are drop outs important?

It is important to minimise the number of drop outs in online surveys because:

• It increases the amount of missing data, which is problematic because it can introduce confounding variables. For example, if all the people who drop out at a certain point exhibit a common quality, the collected data will be skewed away from this group, and the results will therefore be unrepresentative.
• Lower completion rates decrease reliability because there are less responses to compare.

What are normal drop out rates?

There is currently limited research on the number of drop outs that occur in online surveys, but the evidence suggests that drop outs can fluctuate greatly depending on a large number of factors. A review of recent online surveys indicates that drop out rates vary widely, between 4% and 33%.

Factors that decrease the drop out rate

Despite the variety of survey topic areas over which the review was conducted, there is a strong indication of the factors that encourage lower attrition rates:

• The offering of incentives to win prizes: Offering a lottery system has been found to be the most effective, particularly where there are many small prizes and a higher chance of winning as opposed to fewer big prizes. Research has also demonstrated that altruistic prizes (donations to charity) are less successful.
• Minimising technical problems: Surveys should be designed to support multiple browsers with different settings, and should be as stable as possible. Given that internet surveys are slightly more complex for the respondent than pen and paper or telephone surveys, technical problems have been shown to contribute strongly to higher attrition rates. The option for respondents to save the survey by having a password to return at a later stage also decreased attrition.
• Length itself is not an issue: Respondents were found to complete long surveys if they knew from the beginning how long the survey was going to take, and were able to inspect the survey first. It has also been noted that attrition decreases if surveys are presented on multiple pages with a bar on each page demonstrating the percentage of the survey completed.
• Placement of demographic questions: surveys with demographic questions at the end (rather than at the start) had lower attrition rates.
• Introductory & reminder emails: Response rates increase when the initial email introducing the survey was personally addressed to the respondent, and when subsequent reminder emails were sent to non-respondents.
• Survey design: Low level graphics that make the page more interesting were found to reduce drop out rates, but the design should not make the survey too image heavy – this looks confusing and makes the survey more difficult to download.
• Type of questions: If respondents become confused, do not see the relevance of questions or find the questions too personal, they will tend to drop out. These factors should be kept in mind when designing a survey.