20 stories for 20 years: Driving change through research

All too often, lawmakers fail to recognize the relationship between policy decisions and the impact they have on small businesses. Small Business Majority helps people in power make that connection in a variety of ways, including by conducting our own original research. Since our earliest days, we’ve utilized scientific opinion polling on the national and state levels to determine small business owners’ views on a range of topics like access to capital, healthcare and workforce issues, and also to learn about how various issues and challenges are actually impacting their businesses. We then use these findings to drive our advocacy work.

The first major issue Small Business Majority tackled was healthcare because access to health insurance has long been a barrier to entrepreneurship. Although the voices of individual small business owners have always been an important part of our advocacy work, research played a particularly significant role in our successful campaign to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2009-10. During that time we published extensive research about small business needs, securing a New York Times exclusive for our data, which helped convince many lawmakers of the relationship between health insurance and small business ownership.

To this day, opinion polling continues to shape our advocacy work. One of our recent research reports found that entrepreneurs are still struggling with rising healthcare costs. Small businesses that offer health coverage to their employees report that the cost of insurance premiums (78%), prescription drug copays (60%), and hospital visits (59%) have increased. As a result, nearly one-quarter (24%) of small businesses had to drop health coverage altogether. With this in mind, we’ve been a strong champion for renewal of enhanced premium tax credits, which help lower health insurance premiums for 90% of ACA Marketplace participants but are nonetheless facing expiration at the end of this year. Not surprisingly, our polling found strong support among small businesses owners for these tax credits.

In addition to our quantitative analysis, we conduct other types of research including focus groups of small business owners. This provides us with access to a wide range of personal anecdotes. Qualitative research allows us to evaluate how government programs and policies impact small business owners so we can obtain a deeper understanding than we can through our quantitative research alone.

In the past, our research samples have not been limited to Small Business Majority’s network. This year, however, in an effort to help ensure that even more voices from the smallest businesses are heard, we launched our Voice of Main Street opinion poll series. This survey offers a quarterly snapshot of the challenges and opportunities entrepreneurs in our network face across a range of key issues. Our Voice of Main Street survey samples to date have been mostly female and contain responses from a high percentage of business owners with incomes under $100,000 – a group that policymakers do not always hear from. These polls allow us to track how a group of entrepreneurs feels about business conditions over time in addition to understanding what they feel like are the most important policy issues currently impacting their small businesses. This insight from a diverse group of small business owners provides a powerful lens into the needs, priorities and perspectives of true Main Street businesses nationwide.