Trading Cards		page contents What How Go On
What Is It Good For?		This and MATS are good for plan formulation and evaluating alternatives. While MATS helps show the comparative merits between alternatives, this helps show the publics' perception of how alternatives stack up. No alternative is going to provide all of the solutions for all of the problems. If the public can see that tradeoffs will have to be made, and if they can have a hand in helping to determine those tradeoffs, then your process has a much better chance of success. The "trading cards" game will help you: Determine the relative importance of the alternative's features or issues to various publics.   Explore the publics' willingness to pay more for a feature or to trade another for it.   Sort and rank combinations of possible alternatives from the publics' perspective
How Do I Use It? Use this in conjunction with other polling and paring techniques to determine priority.		Before you introduce this exercise, you must have identified which options you want the group to evaluate. You may want to run through the exercise with a smaller core group to see if there are too many options to handle. To play:   Recruit a small focus group representing various publics. (You may break a large meeting into smaller groups and compare notes at the end, or you may want to meet with several small focus groups.)   Prepare a series of cards for each participant. Each card should detail one feature and its cost or other attribute. (Remember that attribute can be positive or negative.)   Have participants rank each card in order of preference or perceived value.   Create two or three different scenarios--what if you have only three of these options? What if having option x meant that you could not have option y? What if having option x meant that you also needed to include either option a or b?   For each scenario, have participants display which card they would choose. (You may analyze each participant's choices separately, assign number values and add up the rankings, or have the group as a whole agree on what would be preferable.)
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