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Survey lists are a list of email addresses, telephone numbers, or mailing addresses of people in your target segment. A survey panel is a paid or volunteer group that agrees to answer surveys.
What it is: When a survey is developed, it needs to be presented to the target audience to be completed. You can do this in person in a mall or location intercept, or through telephone call, email, social media invitation, or a standing panel. How you recruit participants for your survey can have a significant impact on potential biases related to selection and response. Today, most surveys are completed by email. Most survey panels are paid and can be public panels that you can pay to use, or private panels that a company manages for their private use.
What it does: There is always a trade-off in deciding how to recruit survey respondents. The trade-offs are between speed, cost, resources, and potential bias. When you choose, you determine the cost, breadth of coverage, speed of completion, management of bias, and resources required.
How it is used: Each survey requires a respondent base, and your selection of respondent acquisition may determine the success of your project regarding accuracy, timing, and cost.
Where: The types of respondent acquisition vary. Some examples are listed below:
If you're working on a research project and you need assistance gathering the required sample, Qualtrics has a research services team that has access to over 30 million profiled individuals to take your survey. This service allows you to target for specific demographics (e.g., Walmart shopper, iPhone owners, targeting for race, gender, occupation, geographic location, etc.)
Friends and social media invitations: The least expensive, quickest, and least manageable approach is to send invitations to your friends and post social media invitations for survey respondents. Unless your friends and social media contacts are the target audience, this can create significant bias in the results. It may be successful in reaching the desired number of respondent goals or may fall significantly short.
Targeted audience email list: You can obtain email lists from many concentrated audiences. You may be able to obtain a free email list of a company’s customers, a professional organization member list, a club email list, etc. Paid email lists for specific audiences may also be available for purchase. The quality and pricing of these lists can vary widely. Normal response rates are often in the 2–5% level, but some lists can have far lower response rates (see the warning below). You can purchase or rent paid lists from many venues, and there are some businesses and organizations that offer email lists for sale. Most email lists are only rented, and the people on the email list probably do not know that their email is on the list.
Telephone survey acquisition: Call centers can provide access to telephone survey respondents. If you are looking for a general population target, call centers can be a cost-effective way to obtain survey responses. The more specific your target market is, the more expensive the call center will be.
Survey panels: Survey panels are different from email lists, because with a panel, you only pay for completed surveys, but with the email list, you pay for the address even if they never open your survey. There are two kinds of survey panels: 1. panels owned and managed privately by a company, and 2. panels that are available to rent publicly for a fee. Survey panels are available on many topics and can be found in many settings.
Quatrics survey panels: Qualtrics offers access to over 120 different survey panel companies with more than 30 million panelists. Panels can be used to find specific people, like front-line employees, first-level managers, small-business owners, IT professionals, CFOs, CEOs, etc. Below is an informational announcement about the Qualtrics survey panels:
Why: You cannot have survey results without respondents, so you will need to have a way to reach your target audience.
Where it shouldn't be used: Don’t use casual friend and social media respondent lists for surveys that will influence decisions with a large financial impact. Be sure that the quality of your respondent pool reflects the value of the decisions that will be made based on the findings of the survey.
Any restrictions: Most of the respondent acquisition technique methods listed in this document require financial funding. Please do not agree to any paid service unless you have identified who will pay for the services and you have a written agreement with the sponsor.
Warnings: When you use social media respondent requests, you have very little control over respondent acquisition. Only use social media when the target audience is concentrated in your friends and social media contacts and the risk of bias does not have a significant cost. Also be aware that some mailing lists have a historical response rate as low as .04%, so you would need an email list of about 25,000 to get 10 responses. Carefully research the historical response rate for an email list you buy or rent.
Determine the desired outcome of your survey, including what decisions you will make and what actions you will take based on the results.
What is the cost of making the wrong decision or taking the wrong action? The higher the cost of a wrong decision, the more important it is to have a highly targeted survey respondent pool.
How large of a population is available in the different respondent acquisition techniques? How many respondents do you need to complete the statistical analysis and have a small enough error margin with a 95% confidence level to make the decision?
What is the cost per completed survey to reach the desired target audience, with confidence that you have not introduced unreasonable bias?
What budget is available to complete the survey and obtain the desired results? What percentage of the budget will each respondent acquisition type use?
Complete a prioritization table to determine the best respondent acquisition technique for this survey.
Additional Suggestions for How to Find Survey Participants
Use the prioritization table to display output and recommendations
This content is provided to you freely by Ensign College.
Access it online or download it at https://ensign.edtechbooks.org/projectbased_internships/survey_lists_versus_panels.
