A woman with curly hair and glasses shopping for green buckets in a store aisle.
Close-up view of a computer screen showing a pattern of black and white dots creating a wave-like visual effect.
Grocery Aid logo in black and white with the word 'Grocery' in large bold font and 'Aid' inside a rectangle

Charity audience
needs-based Segmentation

The Insight Challenge

Spiral pattern with concentric circles.

GroceryAid, the industry charity supporting workers across the UK grocery sector, needed to move from a service-led to a needs-led approach to delivering support. With many potential users unaware of or not engaging with available help, the challenge was to build a deep understanding of the needs, crisis journeys and barriers to help-seeking among grocery workers — and translate this into a segmentation that could directly inform communications, UX and outreach strategy.

The project we crafted

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A three-phase mixed-method research programme — combining frontline staff insight, qualitative community research and a large-scale segmentation survey — built around the needs and crisis journeys of grocery workers to help GroceryAid reach more people, earlier.

  • A frontline staff video Q&A programme capturing the experience-based knowledge of GroceryAid counsellors and caseworkers — surfacing common crisis triggers, audience types and gaps in current support journeys

  • A online qualitative insight community with grocery workers across retail, logistics, wholesale and FMCG — exploring lived experiences, help-seeking behaviours, Jobs-to-be-Done and reactions to GroceryAid's proposition and communications

  • A robust segmentation survey of 600 grocery workers, using MaxDiff prioritisation and cluster analysis to identify distinct audience need-states and profile key segments

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Outcomes

A needs-based segmentation and suite of rich audience personas — each covering Jobs-to-be-Done, Switching Forces, journey preferences and fit with GroceryAid's proposition — providing a strategic foundation for communications, UX and outreach strategies to help more people access support.

“The Waveform team took a pretty comprehensive brief, then showed us how they could deliver not only that but so much more – all within a budget that we, as a charitable organisation, could actually afford.

Their expertise in needs-based segmentation was immense, their communication throughout the research journey was clear, responsive and enlightening and their deliverables were impactful and actionable. They have provided us with a rich seam of insights which we are using to help size our opportunity, reshape our proposition, restructure our website, and which will be fed into our evolving comms and media strategies.”

Insight Manager, GroceryAid