This week marks Sunita’s last week of residency at U.S. Digital Response (USDR), where she has made a significant mark as a champion for user research. Embedded in our Digital Delivery team, Sunita’s empathy and passion for ensuring user’s voices are heard has helped inform a significant portion of USDR’s work. Below, Sunita has offered some words of wisdom for those in the public sector looking to compensate research participants.
Partner:
By: Sunita Ram, Technologist-in-Residence at U.S. Digital Response
There is a rising interest in government agencies to conduct user research in order to understand the needs of their constituents. With this human-centered mindset, many agencies are building up their internal research capacity and looking for ways to institutionalize research best practices into policy and legislation.
It is critical in user research to compensate research participants for their time, effort, and insights — especially when conducting research with vulnerable populations from marginalized communities.
Government officials are navigating complex rules and regulations in order to secure the necessary funds and provide incentives to participants. Through this article, we hope to shine the light on some of the forerunners and help those who are just starting to establish practices for research compensation in their organizations.
In USDR’s research collaborations with government partners, we’ve learned that finding a source of funding for research compensation is a recurring challenge across many agencies.
A panel of user researchers and product managers collaborating with city and state government agencies suggested a few avenues to identify funding for user research:
Once a source of funding is identified, the next step is to figure out a mechanism to distribute it.
Here are some inspiring examples of people who navigated complex bureaucratic processes to distribute research incentives.
Tips
1. Check your jurisdiction’s Procurement Manuals/Procurement Desk Guides to find the purchase limit below which a bidding process is not required. For example: 60 minute qualitative interviews with 8–12 research participants would cost about $480–960 for research compensation and may fall under the stipulated purchase limit.
2. Identify a contractor, nonprofit or community foundation with whom you already have a contractual relationship to serve as the distributor of funds to residents.
3. Ask team members with government-issued credit cards to check if they can be used for the purchase of research incentives in your project.
User researchers and digital service teams within the government are developing policies and memos that formalize the processes around distributing incentives to research participants.
Here are a few examples that inspired us:
As you begin to institutionalize compensation practices within your government agency, it can be valuable to lean on and reference published examples from other government agencies.
If you know of other organizations who have published guidelines and are translating research best practices into policy and legislation, please email our Digital Delivery team to spotlight their work in this space.
Whether you are just beginning to figure out how to compensate research participants or are in the weeds of navigating internal processes to make it happen, we hope these stories inspire you to keep on going. Yes, it is challenging but you can make research incentives a reality in your organization!
Our talented USDR research volunteers have supported many government partners through this process. Please reach out to us if we can be of help to you.
If you have a compensation practice to share or know of an awesome reference that could help others who are setting up research practices within government, please let us know at info@usdigitalresponse.org and we’d be delighted to help spread the word.
We envision a future where every local and state government has instilled compensation of research participants as a core tenet of the research practice within their organization.
U.S. Digital Response has a team of pro bono professionals ready to help governments respond to the critical needs of their communities. Need help? Fill out this brief intake form to connect with USDR, and we’ll be in touch quickly.