A Baby Brand I Love Asked for My Feedback. They Never Got It.

A baby brand I love invited me to be a beta tester and I said yes in about four seconds. Then I lost their survey. I started it on a walk with my 6-month-old daughter Brooke, one hand on the stroller, and gave up ten minutes in because it needed two hands and a keyboard. No reminder ever came, so they never got my feedback. Most teams trying to reach audiences like me have already gone async. Format is the part still missing.

"Hard to reach" usually means "hard to schedule"

Almost every conversation I have about hard-to-reach audiences names the same groups. Moms of newborns. Shift workers. Nurses. Field techs. Founders in year one. And underneath it is the assumption that these people don't want to participate.

I don't buy it. The audiences everyone calls hard to reach usually have the strongest opinions in the room. What they don't have is a free, uninterrupted half hour at 2pm on a Tuesday. So a scheduling problem gets filed as a motivation problem. It also means your sample quietly becomes "people whose calendars bend to a researcher's calendar," which is a real bias. Removing the calendar component solves some of the problem, but for new moms like me that alone isn't enough.

I was the most motivated participant they could have asked for

I came back from maternity leave earlier this year. Before Brooke, I knew approximately nothing about baby products. Now I have opinions about all of them and I want to try everything new. So when a brand I already loved asked me to beta test, I jumped at it.

I opened the survey on a walk. Ten minutes in, Brooke woke up and the walk stopped being a walk. And this survey wanted me to comparatively rank value props and messaging. By typing. On a phone. One-handed. (I have mastered the one-handed stroller walk. I have not mastered the one-handed ranking exercise.) I told myself I'd come back to it. When I did, it didn't save my progress, and I didn't have the energy to restart.

The frustrating part is that I had a lot to say about why I'd rank those messages the way I would. That was the part they needed, but it's also the part that is most challenging to get out of a survey.

Parents don't have less time. We have time in pieces, with our hands full.

The data on this is more specific than I expected.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2025 American Time Use Survey found that adults in households with a child under six spend 2.3 hours a day on primary childcare, meaning childcare was the main thing they were doing. Women in that group averaged 2.8 hours to men's 1.7. And that undercounts it, because primary childcare leaves out every hour where your kid is in your care while you're doing something else. Which, for me as a working mom, is many of them.

Same survey: employed adults living with a child under six get 3.2 hours of leisure a day. Employed adults in households with no kids under 18 get 4.5.

Pew Research Center fills in the shape of those hours. They surveyed 2,242 working parents in March 2026, and 70% said they handle parenting tasks while working, while 59% handle work tasks while they're with their kids. Among full-time working moms it's 81%, and 38% say it happens extremely or very often.

None of that reads as "unavailable" to me. It reads as available in five and ten minute pieces, with hands already committed.

A scheduled thirty-minute call doesn't fit that. Neither does a twenty-minute typing exercise.

Going async fixed the when. Almost nobody talks about the format.

Most of the good advice about hard-to-reach audiences is about timing. Go async. Drop the scheduled call. Let people take part whenever it works for them.

That advice is right! It's also half the job.

If the async thing you hand me is still a survey I have to type, you moved the constraint without removing it. Format is a separate question from timing: what are this person's hands free to do in the window when their attention is free? For a lot of audiences the answer is talk, and not much else.

There's research on this, with a caveat. A 2016 study out of Stanford, the University of Washington and Baidu measured phone text entry both ways and clocked speech at about 161 words per minute against 53 for the keyboard, roughly 3x, with about 20% fewer errors. Sixteen participants in a lab, so read it as a measure of how fast people can get words out rather than a claim about survey behavior. But anyone who has dictated a text while holding a baby already knows which direction it points.

In my personal life, Siri has become my best friend. At work I send far more voice notes than I used to, because the pockets where I actually have a thought (while I'm warming up a bottle, on a walk, holding Brooke) are pockets where typing isn't an option and talking is. And talking gets you something different. What got lost when I bailed on that survey wasn't my ranking. It was my reasoning. A ranking gives you the order. A conversation gives you the because, and the because is what tells you which message to build.

What it looks like when the format fits the audience

Hatch hit this while they were developing the Sleep Clock, and it's the cleanest example I've seen of a team matching the format to the people they needed to hear from. Their design and research team ran 11 studies and gathered about 221 participant interviews in roughly ten weeks, with four of those studies launching inside a single 15-day stretch. The interviews, per the case study, "happened whenever participants had a few free minutes."

Amanda Amyx, their Senior Director of Design & Research, put it this way: "The type of data we get is natural, conversational language from consumers, exactly what they're saying, being able to get that at scale, and at such rapid speed."

They didn't shortcut their research so they could move faster, and they didn't trade depth for reach. They got moms talking, in their own words, at a volume that usually pushes a team into a survey instead. This would've gotten me talking too. So back to what I said about me wanting to try every baby product on the market - I have Hatch sound machines in just about every room in our house and on all our strollers. It's what allows me to send these voice notes in the first place without fear of waking her up. I didn't make it on the send list of Hatch's most recent research, but when I do, they will hear from me!

Five things worth checking in your own research

Are your soft numbers a willingness problem or a format problem?
Before you write an audience off as disengaged, check the format, look at where people drop, not just how many.

Who is your current method quietly excluding?
If taking part requires a scheduled, uninterrupted block, your sample tilts toward people who control their own calendars. Write down who that leaves out.

What does a free moment actually look like for this audience?
Not when they're free. What they can physically do when they're free. Hands, privacy, screen or no screen and even preferred language.

Are you capturing the choice or the reasoning?
Rankings and scales give you the what. If you need the why behind a message or a price, the format has to let people explain themselves.

Does anything bring an abandoner back?
My progress didn't save, and I didn't want to restart. That's a whole segment of high-intent, half-finished responses that most teams never chase.

What I'd want a brand to know

I'm not a hard-to-reach consumer. I'm an enthusiastic one with two hands already occupied. Give me a format that fits my day and that brand would have gotten more out of me than a finished survey would have held, in less time than I spent giving up on the typing.

I can't point you to a study proving that most abandoned surveys are format failures rather than motivation failures. What I have is my own case, plus a pattern I keep seeing with the teams I talk to: the audiences everyone calls unreachable get a lot more reachable the moment the ask changes from typing to talking. So if your numbers are soft on a group everyone agrees is hard to reach, it's worth asking whether they're really hard to reach, or whether you're asking them to do something their hands are busy for.

And to any baby brand reading this: I have so much feedback. Please just don't make me type it.

FAQ

Why are some audiences hard to reach in research?
Usually scheduling and format, not unwillingness. Groups like new parents, shift workers and clinicians rarely have a predictable uninterrupted block for a moderated call, and often can't type a long survey in the pockets of time they do have. Their availability is interleaved rather than blocked out.

How do you reach hard-to-reach research participants?
Remove both constraints instead of one. Let people take part whenever they're free, and let them respond by talking rather than typing. Fixing the timing alone moves the barrier without removing it.

Why do people abandon surveys partway through?
Effort and context. A survey that needs sustained typing, or comparative ranking that's awkward on a phone, assumes conditions the respondent may not have when they open it. Many abandoners are willing participants who got interrupted, and most never get a prompt to come back.

Is voice better than typing for research responses?
For effort and for depth, generally yes. Research on mobile text entry has measured speech at roughly three times the speed of a phone keyboard with fewer errors, and talking surfaces reasoning rather than just a selection. A ranking tells you the order someone picked. A conversation tells you why, which is usually what drives the decision.

Can you get survey-scale reach without losing qualitative depth?
Yes. AI-moderated interviews let people take a conversational interview on their own schedule, so qualitative work can run at numbers that used to require a survey. You also can include closed ended survey questions within the interview for instances when that format does make the most sense. Hatch ran 11 studies and about 221 interviews in roughly ten weeks that way.

Does this only apply to parents?
No. The same pattern holds for any audience whose free time is interruptible and hands-busy: shift workers, nurses, drivers, retail staff, caregivers, founders. The parent perspective just happens to be the one I've felt firsthand.

Want to see how Strella helps you reach more hard to reach consumers? Talk to our team.