The Community Business Market in 2020

This is the sixth in a series of annual reports published by the Power to Change Research Institute on the state of the community business market. This iteration is the fourth researched and written by CFE Research and utilises the same robust methodological approach as 2019, enabling continued confidence in the findings.

The research makes use of a combined dataset of responses from an online and Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) survey of community businesses from 2019 and 2020 totalling 449 respondents (the 2020 survey was live throughout May and June); telephone interviews with 15 individuals which reflected the range of sectors within the community business market and the differing extents to which Covid-19 had impacted levels of operation; secondary databases; and literature. The market size estimates are based on pre-Covid-19 data but the survey, which was live during the first lockdown, enables some pre-pandemic comparisons. The addition of case studies illustrates the response of individual community businesses to the pandemic.