Where there's a way...safe participation in the outdoors
September 25, 2024
NZ Mountain Safety Council (MSC) is New Zealand’s leading land-based outdoor recreation incident prevention organisation. Its mandate is to ‘encourage safe participation in land-based outdoor activities’.
It does this by developing safety resources based on evidential insights, working closely with a range of partners (e.g., Accident Compensation Corporation, Department of Conservation, MetService and NZ Police) and delivering targeted safety messages and campaigns which positively change safety behaviours and improve safety outcomes.
Rangahau Aotearoa is MSC’s primary research provider. Initially, when we started working with MSC over six years ago, we used traditional research methods (e.g., online panels) to sample their primary target audience (e.g., trampers and hunters) for the purposes of conducting their research.
However, to obtain workable samples, these methods were relatively expensive and didn’t necessarily deliver the numbers or quality that we wanted. Therefore, we needed a Plan B.
After exploring the available options, the decision was made to set up a dedicated outdoor research community. To do this, people with an interest in land-based outdoor activities were invited to join the community using a range of different channels, such as social media, the media, emails to MSC’s contact database, outdoor event sponsorship and sharing via MSC partners.
This messaging encouraged people to register for the community. To complete the registration, they were sent an 'onboarding' questionnaire asking them to identify their outdoor activities, in addition to capturing their basic demographic details and their contact preferences. As soon as it was submitted, they received an email, confirming their registration.
The MSC research community, called Adventure Voice, became operational early in 2024 and by November 2024 had almost 3,500 registered members.
For privacy reasons, the community is managed by Rangahau Aotearoa. This involves overseeing the contact database and ensuring its integrity by onboarding new registrants, updating members’ contact and other personal details, and removing members who unsubscribe.
The community is utilised approximately every 6 weeks with short, targeted 5-minute ‘pulse’ surveys. For example, in July 2024, the survey was focused on overnight/multi-day trampers. Questions are developed by MSC and then refined by Rangahau Aotearoa, before each survey is launched for about one week. Typically, we invite about n=1,500 to complete each survey and about 40% do so.
Anonymised survey results are immediately processed and uploaded to an e-reporting tool that we have developed for MSC, enabling MSC to analyse the results using a simple table builder.
"Working with Rangahau New Zealand to develop our own research community has been a hugely rewarding and insightful experience. We've leaned on the team’s expertise and experience to guide us through this process, and this has been instrumental in turning the idea of a dedicated outdoor research community into a reality. Their ability to manage the confidential panel membership data and provide us with timely, high-quality data and findings has been critical to this success." Nathan Watson, Operations Manager, MSC
