From the Helia Library — based on the article The Power of Ten Conversations, from our Coffee Chat with Aylin Bell.
What’s Inside
Start with Aylin’s example to see the real thing, then build your own version.
01 — Aylin’s Market Research Interview Guide
The real 16-question set Aylin used to find out whether a school district would actually buy a math teacher PD offering. Use this first, as a reference, before you build your own guide.
02 — Build Your Own Interview Guide
A fill-in-the-blanks worksheet that adapts Aylin’s structure — objective, targets, questions, outreach note, and tracker — to any sector or offering. Use this once you’ve decided what you’re testing and are ready to set up your own conversations.
When Resources and Templates Aren’t Enough
These guides will get you into the room and help you make sense of what you hear. What they can’t do is run the conversations for you — and if you’ve spent a long time building your idea, it can be genuinely hard to hear “we’d probably stick with what we have” as information rather than rejection. That’s usually where having someone else in the room, or reviewing what came back, makes a real difference.
If you want help with market research
Aylin Bell works with education and youth development nonprofits to help develop and implement strategies for scaling their impact. She spent 20 years at WestEd, a 1,000-person education nonprofit, in senior roles across business development, strategy, and organizational capacity building, where she brought in more than $50M in competitive proposals and grew the organization’s earned income lines.
She’s a good fit if:
- You’re trying to diversify revenue and want a partner who’s actually built earned income lines inside a nonprofit
- You want quick, practical market research, the version that informs a real go-to-market strategy
- You need a strategic plan, retreat, or board convening led by someone who has run these inside a large organization
- You’ve got an ambitious, cross-functional project with no obvious owner, and you need someone who will carry it through implementation
Connect with Aylin!
About Aylin
Some of Aylin’s favorite projects have been close collaborations with leaders and teams passionate about an idea, a service, or a product, working on how to grow it and run it well. She loves translating across functions, keeping impact at the forefront of the work, and finding creative and resourceful ways to get things done.
She spent two decades at WestEd, where she led the organization’s first agency-wide strategic plan, built and grew earned income lines, and restructured programs. Earlier in her career she was the COO of a KIPP middle school.
Work with Aylin