Survey lists are a list of email addresses, telephone numbers, or mailing addresses of your target segment. A survey panel is a paid or volunteer group that agrees to answer surveys.
What it is: When a survey has been developed it needs to be presented to the target audience to be completed. This can be done in person in a mall or location intercept, telephone call, email, social media invitation, or through a standing panel. Selecting how you will recruit the participants for your survey can have a significant impact on potential biases related to selection and response. Most surveys are completed by email today. Most survey panels are paid and can be public panels that you can pay to use, or are private panels that are managed by a company for their private use.
What does it do: There is always a trade-off in deciding how surveys respondents will be recruited. The trade-offs are between speed, cost, resources, and potential bias. By selecting your specific choice you determine the cost, breadth of coverage, speed of completion, management of bias, and resources required.
Uses:
How is it used: Each survey requires a respondent base, and your selection of respondent acquisition may determine the success of your project in meeting its desired goals of accuracy, timing, and cost.
Where: The types of respondent acquisition are wide and varied. A number of examples are given below:
If you're working on a research project and you need assistance gathering the needed 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 (i.e. Walmart shopper, iPhone owners, as well as targeting for race, gender, occupation, geographic location, etc.)
Friends and Social Media invitation: The least expensive, quickest, and least manageable approach is to send out invitations to your friends and posting 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 way short.
Targeted Audience Email list: Email lists can be obtained from many concentrated audiences. You may be able to obtain a free email list of customers of a company, professional organization member list, Club email list, etc. to contact respondents. There are also paid email lists for specific audiences that can be purchased. The quality and pricing of these lists can vary widely. And normal response rates are often in the 2% to 5% level but some lists can have far lower response rates (see the warning below). Paid lists can be purchased or rented from many venues and there are a number of 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 as your target, respondents 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 than email lists, because for a panel you only pay for completed surveys, while for the email list you pay for the address even if they never open your survey. There are 2 kinds of survey panels 1.) panels that are owned and managed privately by a company, and 2.) panels that are available to be rented 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 containing 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, CEO, etc. Below is an informational announcement about the Qualtrics Survey Panels:
Why: You can not have survey results without respondents, so you will need to have some kind of mechanism to reach your target audience.
Limitations:
Where it shouldn't be used: Casual friend and social media respondent lists should not be used for surveys that will impact decisions that will have a large financial impact. Be sure that the quality of your respondent pool is related to 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 an agreement with the sponsor in writing that they will pay.
Warnings: Social Media respondent requests have very little control involved in a respondent acquisition, and should only be used when the target audience is concentrated in your friends and social media contacts and the risk of bias does not have a significant cost to the sponsor of the survey. Another area of warning is that there are some mailing lists that have a historical response rate as low as .04% which would mean that you would need an email list of about 25,000 to get 10 responses. Be careful to research the historical response rate for an email list you buy or rent.
Determine What is the desired outcome of your survey including what decisions you will make and what actions you will take based on the findings
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 to me in the different respondent acquisition techniques. How many respondents do I need to complete the statistical analysis and have a small enough error margin with a 95% confidence level to make my decision?
What is the cost per completed survey to reach the desired target audience, with the confidence that you have not introduced unreasonable bias
What budget is available to me to complete the survey and obtain the desired results. What % of my budget will be used by each respondent acquisition type
Complete a prioritization table to determine the best respondent acquisition technique for this survey
