MHM worked with the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) to develop and embed a psychographic segmentation system of their market that would help them better understand the values and motivations of their visitors and supporters.

During the first stage of the project MHM delivered a series of workshops with WWT staff. This was primarily a knowledge gathering exercise to understand staff perceptions of current users and to develop a hypothetical set of segments.

The second stage of the project involved a visitor survey across three of WWT’s sites to probe respondents’ motivations and attitudes towards their engagement with WWT. We combined this with psychographic information to generate the segments.

In the third stage of the research we ran a series of visitors forums to gather rich qualitative data to add colour and depth to the visitor segment profiles.

During the final implementation phase of the project MHM worked with key internal stakeholders to help WWT understand what the segmentation system meant for their organisation and how it would impact in strategic terms. We then developed a set of segment pen portraits –an easy to use tool that enabled staff at all levels to firmly grasp the different visitor segments, their needs, engagement and behaviour.

The combination of wide-ranging research methodology, rigorous statistical analysis and a commitment to partnership working delivered a segmentation system which was intuitive and easily embedded into existing systems.