Overview
Every year, the QRCA Board of Directors meets in person at its annual conference to map out the organization’s strategic plan for the following year.
Following their 2025 planning session, the QRCA board faced critical questions about how current members, prospective members, and former members perceived the organization. To ensure their upcoming strategy was rooted in meaningful, actionable data, they needed a comprehensive research initiative that could be executed, analyzed, and translated into strategy ahead of their 2026 annual meeting.
To achieve this under a tight timeline, QRCA partnered with Civicom, leveraging CyberFacility® to conduct in-depth interviews (IDIs) and the AI-powered Quillit® platform
The Challenge
As an organization run by insights professionals, the QRCA board designed a two-phase research plan—an asynchronous online bulletin board followed by IDIs—targeting current, prospective, and former members, as well as in-house corporate researchers and young professionals.
However, because QRCA is entirely volunteer-led, the board faced a major bottleneck: balancing this initiative with their full-time jobs. Even for research professionals, reviewing and synthesizing the qualitative feedback in time for the 2026 San Antonio conference required a more efficient approach. To inform their strategic rollout, they needed to swiftly answer critical questions without sacrificing depth:
How is the association perceived across different industry segments?
What drives membership value, renewal, or lapse?
What are competing insights organizations doing that this association is missing?
How can the organization attract prospective members and re-engage former ones?
The Solution
QRCA turned to Civicom’s suite of qualitative tools to streamline its workflow. After conducting the initial asynchronous research, they utilized CyberFacility to seamlessly host and record the follow-up in-depth interviews.
To solve the analysis bottleneck, the team deployed Quillit, which allowed the volunteer board to bypass weeks of manual transcription, sorting, and coding. The tool quickly processed the large volume of data from both the online boards and the interview transcripts, allowing the team to conduct efficient segment analysis. By quickly filtering insights within core constituencies (such as corporate researchers versus young professionals), Quillit provided the swift, robust analysis required to meet their hard deadline while respecting the volunteers' limited availability.
The Results
Powered by the rapid insights generated through Quillit, the QRCA board successfully met its deadline and translated its qualitative data into an immediate, four-part growth strategy at the San Antonio conference:
Streamlined Marketing: Merged separate member and non-member newsletters into a single, high-impact monthly update ("The Q") to optimize content delivery.
Revamped Onboarding: Tasked the Membership Committee with structuring new member communications and launching monthly Welcome Coffee Chats led by industry veterans.
New Member Touchpoint Automation: Deployed a targeted first-year email drip campaign to engage new members at the critical 3-, 6-, and 9-month marks.
Targeted Win-Back Campaigns: Established a precise retention initiative for lapsed members, using data-backed messaging that highlights the exact benefits most likely to drive renewals.
Conclusion
By leveraging CyberFacility and Quillit, QRCA proved that even volunteer-led organizations can execute enterprise-level qualitative research under tight constraints. Quillit effectively bridged the gap between valuable qualitative feedback and an immediate, actionable business strategy—ensuring QRCA successfully executed its 2026 objectives and that it remains the gold standard for insights professionals for years to come.
Civicom MRS • June 12, 2026
