Skip to content

Using Expert Networks to Understand the Future of Water Use

In early November 2021, a return Expert by Big Village client reached out to our team seeking experts to opine on a pressing topic: The future of water use. Our client’s organization needed to speak with 8-10 total experts on how the water world is changing and how these changes might affect the way people interact with water in their homes. To add to the exciting challenge, this request came with time duress: Our client was pressed to begin the IDI series one month after reaching out to Expert by Big Village. Each interviewee would need to fulfill a separate subcategory:

A plumbing union representative
A builders’ union representative
A U.S.-based millennial blogger currently remodeling or purchasing a home
A U.S.-based market researcher with a generational work focus
An NGO representative working in water access
A political scientist with an emphasis on Asia
A realtor
An urban planner
An interior designer
A futurist with an outlook of >10 years
A venture capitalist working in home automation and Internet of Things

What We Did:

Though we have thousands of experts enrolled in our network, the Expert by Big Village team met most of our client’s specific needs through our skills and experience in custom recruiting. We quickly divided responsibilities and recruiting routes — then started reaching out to future-facing resource consultants, scouring water use blogs and publications, searching for representation within both types of unions, tapping the referral network afforded by our own massive directory of thought leaders, and marshalling several of our go-to biographical resources to focus only on experts and practitioners landing right on our client’s target.

In step with our standard offering, Expert by Big Village’s deliverable to our client included scoping together, screening each expert, scheduling each interview, joining each IDI to ensure access, anonymizing our client, recording each consultation (with interviewee prior consent), providing the transcript of each interview to our client, and handling payments and contracts for every expert interviewed. The process — and the results — were strengthened by our personal touch, attentiveness, and frequent updates on interview progress and scheduling.

The Result:

To our client’s satisfaction, the Expert by Big Village team met all 10 categories of expert recruitment within our required timeframe. Most importantly, our client was thrilled with the quality and the variety of each expert interview. In the end, this IDI series covered 10 hours of informed discussion on nearly a dozen interesting and essential subpoints across the wide spectrum of water use topics, projections, opinions and experience. The experts we found raised and answered prescient questions regarding the future of water use and access in the U.S. and Asia.
 
 

A note from the client:

“My experience with Big Village was only positive. The process was easy and seamless. The candidates I spoke with were excellent. [The interviewees] provided me with such rich information and insights. [They] were absolutely great with explaining their areas of expertise in a way that I was able to understand and work with the information, which I really appreciated. I also loved the transcription service that created a transcript after the call was done, so helpful for going back and finding quotes from the experts.

The Big Village team was extremely responsive to all of my needs and I received frequent updates about how recruitment was going, what experts were on the horizon etc. I also have to add that this particular recruit had a pretty tight timeline that went through the Thanksgiving holiday, and the Big Village team worked overtime to get experts recruited for my deadline.”