A School of Continuous Improvement survey of free-sample uptake across supermarkets, strip-mall traders, and food trucks becomes the retail baseline the University now benchmarks Open Day visitors against for next year's booking priority.
A six-week population survey of supermarket, strip-mall, and food-truck sampling trays sets the lower-quartile cutoff for next year's booking priority.
A free sample has always been a small, discretionary moment — take one or don’t, and nobody follows up either way. Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard in the School of Continuous Improvement, has now put a population baseline under that moment, surveying how often a browsing shopper takes what’s offered at supermarket tasting stations, strip-mall trader stalls, and food-truck queues across a six-week fieldwork window.
The School counts the exercise among its clearest examples yet of an evaluation instrument travelling from where it was built to somewhere nobody first asked it to go. This term it has put the retail baseline to work closer to home: this year’s Open Day visitors were scored on their own tasting-stall uptake, benchmarked against the retail figures venue by venue, and the University has adopted the lower band of that comparison as its booking-priority filter for next year’s event.
A tasting tray was never going to stay just a tasting tray once someone thought to compare it with something else, and that’s the direction this programme keeps finding itself pulled in.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
Co-authors Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, and Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, led the retail fieldwork and the benchmarking design respectively. “Every population baseline we publish ends up asked to do a little more work than we first planned for it, and this one found its second job faster than most,” said Dr Okafor.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9ijgp9.