As I was struggling to obtain primary research in the form of an interview with charities that deal with the problems relating to homelessness I decided to release a survey as well to get some feedback on peoples feelings towards giving, giving to the homeless and whether or not they carry cash or more specifically spare change.

In this survey, I asked demographic questions including age, gender and employment status.

• How regularly do you carry spare change?
• How regularly do you find yourself without spare change when you want to give to someone that is homeless?
• How regularly do you use the round-up option to donate money to charity in places like McDonald’s?
• How much would you consider to be a small donation similar to spare change?
• How concerned are you that a homeless person will spend the money you give them on drugs or alcohol?
• How much impact do you think people no longer carry change has on the homeless? (1 being very little impact, 5 being a massive impact)
• If given the option how likely would you be to make small donations through contactless or card payments over cash or spare change donations?
• If given the option how likely would you be to give to the homeless cause through contactless or card payments over cash or spare change donations?

I have tried to present my questions as unbiasedly as possible however I do appreciate that there will be some bias as donating to others may be linked to personal views on what makes someone a “good person” and may therefore result in people saying they would be more giving than they would be in reality.  However, I have tried to avoid this by asking about specific circumstances of giving such as the How regularly do you use the round-up option to donate money to charity in places like McDonald’s?

In hindsight and after having watched a video by Terresa Torrez on continuous discovery I would now phrase the questions as follows:

Were you carrying spare change at any point in the last week?

The last time you were at a store or restaurant like McDonalds that provided you the option to donate at the till/ checkout, did you donate?

This would help to improve the accuracy of people in responses as they could refer to a specific and recent timeframe and provide honest answers.

However, responses were still very helpful. I received 22 responses in total. Some of my key findings were as follows:

From this result, I combined the rarely and very rarely at the time of the pitch which amounted to 60% at the time of the pitch (this has now increased to just over 63%). I was then able to ascertain that 60% of people rarely carry spare change.

Likewise from the above findings, I was able to present that 45% of people have been in a position where they have wanted to give to the homeless but have not been able to as they were not carrying spare change.

The above finding allowed me to report that 80% now 81% (combining responses of 4 and 5)  view people no longer carrying spare change as having a big impact on the homeless.

Combining responses likely and very likely I was able to determine that over 40% of people are likely to give the homeless cause via a contactless or card payment over spare change.

I have taken these key findings and presented them in my slide deck as part of my market research. This will be helpful as it will persuade the audience that there is an overall awareness of the need created within the homeless community by the lack of spare change being carried by the general public. It also highlights how many no longer carry spare change and how many would be willing to donate via my proposed solution.