The scope of the team’s project was to find ways to market for a single mothers support group in order to gain more members. The team contributed around 200 hours of research, writing, editing, and collaborating to find the most effective ways to help our client. 

 

Client Meeting: How it shaped our research

 

Our client, Laura Marine, is the Director of Care Ministries and Single Mothers Support Group leader. Our meeting took place on March 6, 2021. It helped solidify the scope of our project as well as shape our research questions.

 

Digital Research: Google, Google Scholar, and IUPUI databases:

 

The information that we collected for our client revolved around a variety of topics, such as:

• What are the best ways to market for small groups using social media?

• What prevents single mothers from joining support groups? 

• How to market to single mothers.

• What keeps members in support groups?

• How to use a budget effectively for support groups.

 

To better assist our client, the team looked for these topics using Google, Google Scholar, and IUPUI databases. The databases we used were EBSCO host and ProQuest.

 

These databases contain copious amounts of scholarly articles and information. From the articles, we were able to pull some of the most beneficial information for our client. The articles that are on these databases are also more likely to be edited and revised to be as correct as possible. Though Google can also have sources that are edited and revised, the databases contain more professional entries. Certain topics though were harder to find in a professional entry. For example, social media information regarding support groups is more likely to be found through Google than a database. As a group, we used a mixture of all these sources of information.

 

We used these search engines to find the most beneficial information for the scope of the project. Some of the search terms that we used to find helpful information were:

• “Mom Support Groups” AND Marketing-- Google + Google Scholar

• “Single Mother Support Group Experiences”-- Google Scholar + IUPUI Library Databases

•  Marketing Strategies AND “Support Group”-- IUPUI Library Databases + Google

•  “Marketing” AND “Social Media”-- Google + Google Scholar

•  “Small Group” AND “Social Media”-- Google + IUPUI Library Databases

•   Motivation for Joining Small Groups-- IUPUI Library Databases

• “Ways to use social media to advertise small groups”-- Google

• “How to keep single moms in support groups” -- Google + IUPUI Library Databases + Google Scholar

• “Single mom support groups” -- Google + IUPUI Library Databases + Google Scholar

• “Support groups” -- Google + IUPUI Library Databases + Google Scholar

• “Single moms struggles and needs” -- Google

• “Facebook groups” -- Google

• “Group page marketing” -- Google

• “Support group pages” -- Google

 

Local Study: Survey Planet Online Survey

 

Even though most of our research brought very beneficial results for our client, we still needed more. We created an online survey using Survey Planet. We created nine questions targeting an audience of single mothers. The nine questions were questions that we could not answer with our research alone. The questions were multiple choice where most of the questions required respondents to choose only one answer. 

 

The survey was shared on the team’s personal Facebook pages and multiple people shared the survey. Also a couple team members shared the survey on Facebook groups for single mothers. Most of our responses came from those groups. The survey had a total of 64 responses and the results were significantly helpful. The results backed up most of our research which helped us make the best supported recommendations for our client.