Versta Research will be presenting new research and insights about thought leadership at the Quirk’s Event next month. The feature presentation is entitled: How to Use Surveys for Thought Leadership on a Shoestring Budget. It is scheduled for presentation and broadcast on Thursday, July 16 at 2:10 p.m. central time. The March event was originally scheduled to take place in Chicago, but it was postponed and reconfigured into a virtual event because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joseph Hopper, president of Versta Research, will be leading the 30-minute presentation. It will focus on a new DIY approach that Versta used with ten extremely fast snapshot surveys for social media over the course of four weeks. The cost of the effort was just a few hundred dollars.

“With surveys for PR typically costing tens of thousands of dollars, we wondered if we could figure out an approach that is fast and cheap without becoming junk,” Hopper explained. “It wasn’t easy, but I think we succeeded. We’ll be showing everything we did and everything we produced. If you’re attending the conference, you can judge for yourself!”

The presentation will show exactly how corporate or client-side researchers can execute these types of surveys for PR for their own companies, using their own teams, leveraging internal skills and resources. It will outline: (1) Tips for developing survey questions that stand out from what competitors are doing; (2) Strategies for using a DIY tool like Google Surveys (there are some surprising challenges); and (3) A storytelling approach to highlight single nuggets of insight that can be shared in visually compelling formats.

The Quirk’s Event is a relatively new industry showcase designed to bring together a large and broad audience of market research and insights professionals. This is Versta Research’s first time speaking at the event. Hopper has a long history of writing top-read articles for Quirk’s Magazine, including “How to Create Spectacular Infographics,” “How to Find and Eliminate Cheaters, Liars and Trolls from Your Surveys,” “Nine Habits of Great Marketing Research Vendors,” and “Mailed It: Paper Surveys Deliver for Chicago Bank.”

After the event, a full video of the presentation will be available for free.