In our community, we don't really have many food choices or restaurants. We knew that there was a new restaurant opening soon, and we wanted a way to encourage people to open a restaurant or help those already open. We created a survey to get insight for those restaurants, regarding the details of people’s dining experience.
We started by making up questions that felt would be beneficial to the success of our local eateries. Once we created the survey, we filmed a video that explained our concerns and also our desire to support the industry. Then, we posted and shared it all over social media in hopes of reaching an audience that stretched across the world.
Our results showed that 259 people from all over the United States and beyond had answered our survey and watched our video. It was exciting to know that people from different states would answer a survey from a small town school.
Once I started working with the data, I created a vision to share with restaurant owners. I focused on when and why consumers went out to eat. My pie graph was the first chart that I made, which represented the populations of the surveyors. Results showed that 175 of the 259 people live in a community with a population under 5000. Then, I created a treemap about why people go out to eat, filtering it to the population of 5000 or less, as our community’s population would fall into that category as well. Finally, I focused on the treemap’s darkest region and made a bubble chart to determine when that set of people typically go out to eat.
Throughout my graphs, I discovered that people in communities like ours typically go out for supper to avoid cooking, grab a quick meal, or to celebrate a special occasion. Based on my findings, I would encourage restaurants to meet these needs by incorporating some of the following during the evening hours…
Celebrating Special Occasions:
Have a party room to rent
Serve a special occasion meal for holidays, such as Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day and/or a dessert for birthdays
Offer a party package that would serve a larger group either at the restaurant or to go.
Grab a Quick Meal
Offer ready meal options for consumers to stop by and grab versus order and wait
Avoid Cooking
Advertise on social media closer to the end of a work day to grab the attention of potential customers that are nearing the end of a long work day.
Advertise nutritious, family friendly meals to take away the guilt of eating away from home