From Constrained to Confident: How Good Innovation Scales Impact for Leading UK Charities

AskRally lets us set up large audiences and revisit them repeatedly. The scale, polling capabilities and detailed results have been extremely useful.

Good Innovation, a 14-year-old consultancy working with the UK's biggest charities, transformed their pre-market validation process by integrating AskRally into their research workflow. By combining synthetic audience testing with traditional methods, they've accelerated project timelines while delivering more robust insights to their charity clients.

• Cut testing time by 0.5-1 day per project cycle

• Scaled audience testing from 2-5 participants to 100+ without increasing costs

• Enabled repeated audience engagement for iterative validation throughout projects

The Challenge

Good Innovation works with many of the biggest and most well-known charities in the UK and overseas, helping them use innovation techniques to deliver and grow impact, income and reach. For 14 years, they've run product development and innovation projects that require extensive user validation, but charity budgets created a significant constraint.

Traditional one-to-one interviews were time-consuming, expensive, and limited to small sample sizes of just two to five participants. This meant Good Innovation wasn't able to do as much validation as needed before bringing solutions to market for their clients. While they supplemented with smoke-screen testing, they lacked a way to get solid early-stage pre-market validation at scale.

"We weren't doing as much validation as we could before going to market… Previously, we were limited to small sample sizes due to charity budgets."

The team had tried other synthetic user solutions, but found them useful yet not intuitive enough for regular use. As part of a two-year transformation testing over 100 different tools, they needed a solution that could deliver both scale and ease of use.

The Solution

Good Innovation discovered AskRally through a search for alternatives in the synthetic audience space. The platform immediately stood out for its ability to easily set up large audience groups and engage with 100+ participants at scale, a dramatic shift from their previous 2-5 participant limitation.

Rather than replacing their existing methods entirely, Good Innovation integrated AskRally into a hybrid research approach. They now use AskRally alongside smoke-screen testing, human-to-human user testing, expert interviews, AI-moderated interviews, and various custom GPTs built through ChatGPT. This combination adds both speed and robustness to their validation process.

"AskRally's scale, polling capabilities and detailed results have been extremely useful," the director noted. The platform proved valuable not just for traditional product development projects, but also for strategic work and planning that don't normally involve extensive audience research.

The team particularly valued AskRally's ability to revisit audiences repeatedly throughout a project, enabling iterative validation that simply wasn't feasible before.

"It is dead easy to use, though the idea of it can initially seem a bit overwhelming. It's really not that hard, give it a go and see what you can do with it."

The Results

AskRally has become an essential component of Good Innovation's transformed research workflow, delivering tangible time savings while improving the quality and confidence of insights delivered to charity clients.

The platform cuts roughly half a day to a full day from each project's in-person user testing requirements. While this might seem modest, it compounds across multiple projects and allows Good Innovation to shorten overall timelines and take clients further in their innovation journeys, a significant win for organizations operating on tight charity budgets.

"AskRally acts as an additional tool which, alongside our other AI tools, allows us to cut roughly half a day to a day from in-person user testing. This shortens project timelines and lets us take clients further, which is a win for them."

The directional insights from AskRally align well with traditional pre-market user testing, providing Good Innovation with greater confidence in what they bring to market for their clients. While the team acknowledges that synthetic audiences don't capture every nuance of human behavior, they've found the platform provides reliable directional guidance that informs their research strategy.

Looking ahead, Good Innovation plans to conduct more formal A-B testing to further quantify AskRally's impact. The platform has already proven its value as part of a modern, AI-enhanced research toolkit that allows the consultancy to deliver better outcomes for the UK's leading charitable organizations.