A voter can like the sound of a proposal and still vote against it. A parent can value education and dread helping with algebra. A person can love the ocean without seeing a place for themselves in a conservation campaign. Goodwin Simon Strategic Research has built a business around these uncomfortable gaps. The hesitation is where its work gets interesting.
The independent public opinion firm, known as GSSR, conducts polling, focus groups, interviews, and communications research for organizations trying to change public attitudes or make decisions. Its clients include political campaigns, foundations, nonprofits, unions, and public agencies. Across those assignments, the practical question is often the same: what would make this audience willing to take the next step?
GSSR’s answer combines familiar research tools with close attention to emotional conflict. Through Heartwired, developed with communications firm Wonder: Strategies for Good, it studies how emotions, identity, values, beliefs, and lived experiences interact. That framework asks advocates to examine the audience’s internal argument before polishing their own.
The trouble with “undecided”
Campaigns have limited money and a deadline that cannot be negotiated. Deciding whom to persuade matters as much as deciding what to say. GSSR argues that conventional ballot-measure research can mistake uncertainty for openness: some people who sound undecided are already strongly inclined toward one side.
Its approach separates durable supporters, entrenched opponents, and people pulled in competing directions. Researchers examine how audiences understand an issue outside the campaign’s carefully constructed presentation, then test what happens when opposition arguments enter the picture. An appealing message needs to survive contact with disagreement.
For a campaign manager, the implication is concrete. A high message rating alone does not settle where the advertising budget should go. The useful question is whether the message addresses an attitude associated with the eventual decision, among people who can actually be moved. GSSR also researches ballot titles and summaries, where a few words can alter how voters understand the choice.
Five interacting influences, not a scoring formula. Questions are an editorial illustration of the framework.
Sometimes the proposal needs editing
A 2018 school-bond discussion in Malibu offers an unusually tangible example of research doing useful work. GSSR presented polling on a proposed $250 million facilities bond. Support among Malibu respondents stood at 52 percent, below the 55 percent threshold discussed at the school-board meeting. When the amount fell to $150 million, support reached 62 percent.
There was an important qualification: the Malibu sample contained only 90 people. The researchers explicitly cautioned about its large margin of error. The figures offered a directional clue about the proposal’s size, rather than a dependable election prediction. Even so, the practical lesson is hard to miss: sometimes an organization should reconsider what it is asking people to support.
Reported support · 90 Malibu respondents · Large margin of error. Poll results, not election results.
That is a less glamorous deliverable than a winning slogan, but an immediately usable one. Research can expose a mismatch between institutional ambition and public willingness before campaign materials turn that mismatch into an expensive commitment.
The people behind the questions
Founding partners Paul Goodwin and Amy Simon bring campaign experience to this work. Goodwin’s published background emphasizes political polling, ballot initiatives, and public policy. Simon arrived through organizing: she worked as a field organizer, campaign manager, fundraising consultant, and political director before becoming a pollster.
She was a lead field organizer on Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign and later studied survey methodology at the University of Maryland. Her biography credits her with helping develop the marriage-equality messaging used in Maine and Washington’s successful 2012 campaigns. Her 2015 Frank Gathering presentation carried a rather less institutional title: Brain Porn Communications.
The wider team includes researchers with backgrounds in social science, law, communications, and Hispanic audience research. Partner John Whaley’s named clients include Earthjustice and the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is a specialist professional-services business whose expertise resides in research design, interpretation, and strategic judgment.
The firm is explicit about its progressive commitments. It describes choosing client partners who share its social-change priorities and continuing to advise them after the analysis is complete. Those statements establish its working orientation; the public team biographies show the mix of campaign and research experience supporting it.
A service business, with actual price tags
Organizations buy a defined research assignment and the advice that follows. GSSR’s listed methods include telephone, mobile, online, in-person, and automated voice surveys. Qualitative options include bilingual focus groups, small-group discussions, and in-depth interviews. Online advertising tests can capture reactions second by second.
“A polling firm is only as good as the numbers it provides.”Goodwin Simon Strategic Research · Services and Methodologies
Public contracts supply a useful view of the economics. Santa Monica Community College District’s March 2020 minutes list a follow-up public opinion survey for master planning at no more than $16,500, with reimbursable expenses capped at $500. Separately, Santa Monica’s city council approved a $50,000 ceiling for a survey contract extension in May 2019, intended to cover an additional resident satisfaction survey.
Plus up to $500 in expenses
Approved spending ceiling
Different assignments. These amounts are neither current quotes nor evidence of final expenditure.
For a buyer, these examples suggest the importance of specifying the decision, audience, and depth of research before asking for a price. A follow-up survey and a multistage persuasion project have different jobs to do. The deliverable might be a measure of public satisfaction, a better-targeted campaign, or a set of tested messages that staff can use.
Getting the ocean out of the abstract
Heartwired’s ocean project shows how GSSR’s research changes the material a communicator works with. Beginning in 2016, GSSR and Wonder undertook audience research with support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Their diagnosis was that conservation communications could become abstract, crowded with scientific processes and policy prescriptions while overlooking people’s emotional connections to the water.
The research identified six ocean mindsets. One, called “All Senses,” describes people’s attachment to the sound of waves, ocean air, sand, and salt water. An anonymous focus-group participant from Charlotte supplied a wonderfully direct explanation: “The ocean does something to your spirit.”
The project also tested stories about repairing damage: people created an environmental problem, then worked together to improve it. The resulting guidance gives advocates something more specific than an instruction to tell better stories. It suggests the experiences a story might evoke and the kind of human action it might make imaginable.
Trust before the next fact
In Colorado, a 2021 vaccine-confidence project commissioned by the Colorado Health Foundation used 19 online focus groups with 93 residents and a dial-test survey of 1,506 adults. GSSR and Wonder examined the concerns of people who were eligible for vaccination but remained unvaccinated.
The findings favored conversations that establish trust, answer questions, and build confidence. Familiar, respectful messengers mattered. So did acknowledging uncertainty without overwhelming people with detail. The project reported a five-point increase in stated vaccination likelihood among unvaccinated respondents and a seven-point increase in those reporting an intention to get vaccinated within two months.
Those are reported intentions, not verified vaccinations. The distinction matters when evaluating persuasion research: an encouraging response to a video is one step in a longer process. The useful takeaway for communicators is to test who delivers the message alongside what the message says.
When the audience is doing algebra
Education gives the firm’s work another setting. Its Striving to Thriving research listened to nearly 4,000 young people over 16 months, exploring occupational identity and imagined futures. The project included Black and Hispanic youth across income levels and white youth from lower-income households.
With Wonder and Gates Foundation support, the Math Narrative Project subsequently examined how stories about math shape students’ perceptions of their abilities. Its documented research ran from March 2022 through February 2024. In 2025, a community of practice of 19 organizations adapted and tested recommendations across four states.
The published field-test overview offers useful corrections to communications habits. Audiences responded to credible, authentic messengers. Teachers benefited from opportunities to reflect, since advice about changing classroom practice could otherwise feel like criticism. Repeated exposure mattered, and recommendations were incorporated into existing learning tools and programs.
Goblins, one participating organization, modified its learning tool to encourage students to seek help, including intervening when they appeared to struggle. MyVillage Project found that some students equated speed with intelligence and added messaging that separated the two. These were partner implementations informed by the project, not software products sold by GSSR. Their changes illustrate why testing delivery can matter as much as testing a sentence.
Listen before you spend
GSSR sits where political polling, audience research, and communications consulting meet. Its distinctive proposition is the combination: investigate an emotionally difficult issue, identify an audience that can move, develop messages, and help clients use the findings. The publicly available Heartwired guides let smaller organizations examine that thinking before commissioning custom work.
What can a reader borrow? Begin with a particular decision and a particular audience. Listen for competing concerns. Test whether the messenger has earned attention. Give people room to describe an experience in their own words. Then revise the proposal, the message, or its delivery according to what the research reveals.
That approach requires a willingness to hear inconvenient answers. Some opponents will remain opposed; some proposals will ask too much. A research partnership becomes useful when the client can act on those discoveries. Goodwin Simon’s most practical promise is the opportunity to make that adjustment before the next campaign begins.