Identifying firms to survey

While the baseline data proved useful in developing an account of the founding patterns of consulting firms, this study, of course, required a much more in-depth account of the current field of consultants: not just about their clients, service portfolio, staffing, and revenue, but more detailed information about particular campaigns, demographic groups targeted, the outcomes of campaigns, and more. To do so would require reaching out directly to consultants through a survey. But a prior task before fielding the survey was to determine which of the 712 firms in the baseline data – again, these were firms active at any point between 1990 and 2004 – continued to be active in providing services to their clients. This is especially important to do in a relatively high-mortality organizational population such as in a field of lobbying firms dependent on variable campaign revenue.

In the planning phase of the survey in 2008, my research team made initial efforts to ascertain which organizations had survived to the present day. This was done with the understanding that this provisional list would need to be culled further once the survey would go into the field, as additional organizations would experience mortality by that point. Thus, in summer 2008, with a team of research assistants, we made efforts to contact all 712 organizations in the baseline data in order to determine whether they continued to be active. Team members first searched firm websites (where applicable) for the most up-to-date contact information for firms, cross-checking these data against the C&E entries from the baseline data and updating information where necessary. Then, using these updated contacts, my research assistants and I placed calls to all firms, simply requesting to confirm organizations’ email and mailing addresses. We were able to directly confirm survival for 194 of these organizations through phone contacts, and we also counted as surviving an additional 39 firms for which we did not speak to an individual but whose voicemail message confirmed the group’s identity (for a sum of 233 surviving groups as of 2008, or 32.9 percent). Firms that had a disconnected number, as well as those that rang ten or more times without an answer (after repeated attempts during daytime hours in the firm’s time zone), were considered effectively defunct.