Rapid Market Research!

This week I got to spend a bit more time working with GardenShare, as we carried out a "rapid market survey"at the Canton and Potsdam farmer's markets.  The Canton market is on Tuesdays and Fridays from 9-2 and Potsdam hosts it's own on Wednesday and Saturday from 9-2.  We preformed the assessment on Friday in Canton and Saturday in Potsdam.

The idea behind the survey was to find out how people were shopping and to assess ways in which to improve their experience.  Rapid market assessments follow a "dot format" to make it easy and hopefully fun for market-goers to answer.  There is a photo below shows what this looks like. 

The big 4 questions we asked were:
1. How often do you shop at the market?
2. How much time have you (will you) spend at the market today?
3. How much money have you (will you) spend at the market today?
4. What did you (will you) buy? 

This photo was taken mid-day at the Canton Farmer's Market

In addition, we would try and ask those who stopped by for suggestions on how they would improve the market and if the times worked well into their schedule. 

In Potsdam, responders noted that they would like to see more of a variety of farmers selling produce, whereas their was an overwhelming amount of Canton market-goers who called for later hours on weekdays to accommodate work schedules.  

I'm interested to see the results when we crunch all of the data, but there were some conclusions that I could draw from just two days:

- Canton's market drew a majority of retired folks, and this is chiefly due to the weekday timing

- Market-goers tend to buy more produce than anything else... they also are calling for more of a variety of farmers selling produce

- People enjoy the social aspect of farmer's market
- People tend to shiver and duck away at the word survey
- More places to advertise are in the Adirondack Park area for families on vacation and also on university campuses because students tend to forget the times
- Various visitors from places like Connecticut (and even as far as Arizona) noted that Canton and Potsdam actually have an impressive market in comparison to the ones near them!  

As I slipped in there, it was quite exhausting at times trying to get a passerby to take the survey.  I can see where the attitude would come from, not wanting to be bothered while meandering through the market, but our survey is really for the betterment of the community and the market!  In the end, those who avoided eye contact and murmured that they "just don't have the time" were only hurting themselves by not getting their opinion heard.  
On the other hand, some participants were quite enthusiastic and gave us some fantastic ideas, such as offering more prepared food and even starting a booth for people to bring their composting food scraps. 

I think that we got a good amount of data collected over the two days and I definitely have some fresh inspiration for integrating the farmer's market into the SLU student body and also helping to make improvements to play to the interests of the Canton/Potsdam community members.