Lisa Wilding-Brown - Innovate MR Archives - GRBN.ORG

Transparency can and should be regarded as an Opportunity, not a Burden

GRBN_News — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 10:05:05 +0000

InnovateMR contributed participants from our proprietary panel, PointClub, as well as facilitated the field management for the GRBN’s 2020 Trust Survey. This study fielded across 10 countries with the primary objective of understanding the general public’s level of trust in the marketing research industry. The study also set out to understand how the public perceives different types of organizations and agencies (as it relates to trust and data privacy protection efforts). While several countries and regions across the globe have implemented regulations intended to protect citizens’ data privacy, our study revealed that market research companies need to do more to gain trust from survey participants.

As we evaluate the level of trust across different organizations and professions, market research ranked 7 out of 15 with only 23^% of participants indicating ‘trust’ for the industry. While our industry fares better than other segments such as search engines (19^%), media (13^%), and social media companies (13^%); other sectors outperformed our vertical such as health authorities (47^%), as well as banking and financial institutions (46^%).

While our survey data paints an alarming picture on the state of trust in our industry, there are material actions we can employ to change this troubling paradigm. While we may feel overwhelmed, transparency can and should be regarded as an opportunity, not a burden. There are meaningful changes MR companies can employ to win over consumers:

Beyond the obligatory privacy policy, provide a concise and simple summary which distills complex legal jargon. Participants should be clear on how your business collects, stores, shares, and destroys personal data.
As updates are made to your privacy policy, provide a summary of what has changed and provide participants with the ability to review historic versions.
Be explicit – provide the purpose and need for this data and how it benefits not only your company, but the participant as well.
Ensure that an active opt-in is presented during each instance of personal data collection. It is unfair to expect that a consent captured at panel registration provides companies free reign to collect additional personal information in perpetuity. Each business scenario is different and the drivers for personal data collection vary from project to project; advise participants every step of the way and re-confirm their consent.
Provide a sufficient feedback loop for survey enquiries and find ways to share non-proprietary data with participants. Giving back to your survey participants has been shown to increase engagement rates and mitigate attrition. Strive to make the participant experience transformational, not transactional.
Fully document your participant data flow and security mechanisms, as well as implement standard operating procedures designed to prevent the risk of a data breach. Mandate employee and 3rd-party compliance through on-going training and e-signature agreements.
Socialize knowledge throughout the entire organization and develop processes to support continued education on this dynamic and complex topic. Establish a regular cadence to revisit privacy protocols, partner agreements, and ensure all internal stakeholders have a seat and voice at the table.

Get involved and start building trust now! Don’t be intimidated by consumer privacy. Find ways to engage with your organization and the wider industry. Share your commitment to data ethics with others and use your personal influence to help your colleagues gain a deeper understanding.

Lisa Wilding-Brown

Innovate MR

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Panel Management Best Practices for Difficult to Reach Audiences

GRBN_News — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 07:57:36 +0000

Market research requires increasingly precise sample matches with an expectation of quality and uniqueness for any given study. How do you manage sample to account for accessibility of different populations, while factoring the inherent lack of uniqueness with so many veteran panelists on board, all while meeting (and hopefully exceeding) the needs of clients?

Panel Recruitment

Sourcing unique, difficult to reach audiences begins with a diverse approach to recruitment. By setting up exclusive relationships with specialty websites that aren’t reliant on pure traffic generation, while utilizing mediums such as TV commercials to reach strategic demographics, you help ensure optimal panel uniqueness.

Panel Management Best Practices

Low response rates to survey invites, low completion rates in surveys, or lack of interest in incentives can create issues immediately. That’s why it’s so important to build a strong relationship with panel participants through:

Regular communication — sending new survey opportunities 1-2 times per week.
Ensuring quality checks and verification methods aren’t too burdensome, protecting data quality without inconveniencing users.
Working with survey programmers to build mobile and desktop optimized surveys that are easy to use.
Providing a clear, enticing incentive program that rewards participants for their time.
Keeping a close eye on conversion rates and targeting practices to avoid excessive panel burn.
Following up and providing immediate response if there is a question or problem to keep panel members engaged.

Respect and appreciation for panel participants is just as important as the data they provide. By treating them well and ensuring they are well rewarded within industry expectations, they will reward us in turn with timely feedback on future surveys.

Incentive Programs that Work

Good incentives are a must, but how do you create a program that works to draw people in and keep them actively engaged? Some things to consider:

Universal Incentives — Incentives that are independent of qualification address the risk of altered responses or churn due to burn-out and conditioning from repeated non-qualification.
Daily Streaks —By rewarding loyal members who “check in” every day with accrued bonuses, you can engage without affecting the quality of sample and responses.

The goal of incentivizing is to groom affinity and trust in the survey process, and never to condition or influence survey responses.

Finding the Right Balance of Email Follow-up

Email is the easiest way to reach and invite respondents to a survey, or encourage them to return and keep up their daily streak. But it can also backfire when overused. Overly frequent emails can push people away, lead to spam issues, and reduce the response rates of your most valuable panel members. That’s why accounting for member frequency, relevancy, and priority of all outbound emails is vital. Whether through the proper balance of incentives, regular follow-ups, or email etiquette, it’s possible to build and maintain otherwise difficult to reach audiences, all while maintaining quality. Lisa Wilding Brown Innovate MR

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Survey Participants: The Polar Ice Caps of Market Research

GRBN_News — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 13:00:52 +0000

In partnership with my esteemed colleagues, I had the fortunate opportunity of developing one of the industry’s first online panels, The Harris Poll Online. Since then, I have built hundreds of panels. Mothers, gamers, business professionals, mortgage brokers, teens, high income earners, GLBTers, physicians and the list goes on. I’ve recruited every audience you can imagine. With all this in mind, I have some ideas about panels and the research ecosystem that may be hard for you to hear. Sit down, grab an ice-cold beverage and buckle up. I’m going to serve you the hard truth. I’m not doing this to win or lose friends. My goal is laser-focused. I want to see this industry survive. I want to see research budgets increase, and marketers around the world to rely on our space for trusted, reliable insights for the long-term. Let’s kick-off the conversation with a story that I think will crystalize the survey participant discussion perfectly. Several years ago, a company that will remain unnamed, proclaimed a bold and controversial marketing message, “Panel is dead.” At the time, my COO and other senior members of the team were outraged. “How could ‘company X’ say such a thing?!” As a result, the bold and brazen voice was silenced and our leadership relegated this firm to the penalty box. In reality, panel wasn’t dead in the real sense. After all, the number of panels in the industry were increasing at an exponential rate. When I started in the early 2000s, there were only a couple of sample companies. In 2017, there are over 60 sample companies listed in Greenbook and I believe this number only scratches the surface. Indeed, panel is not dead, but… panel is very sick. Deathbed sick. Now hold on… let me explain before you demote me to the penalty box. It is not unusual to hear industry bloggers and conference speakers discuss “declining response rates” or “participant burden,” but we have to ask ourselves the question, “Do we really care?” The short answer? ”No.” Most of the industry thinks of participants as a commodity – an infinite resource that will always be available for our use. Plainly put: participants are the polar ice caps of Market Research. We know they are important, but we aren’t doing much to reverse the damage of our daily abuse. Of course, we talk a LOT about the impact of long surveys, shrinking incentive budgets, hostage-taking routers, and price compression. However, at the end of the day, nothing is changing. As a sampling professional, I feel constant pressure to reduce my pricing to compete with what I call “faux sampling companies.” These are companies that pretend to be sampling experts. Unfortunately, under the covers they are nothing more than online traffic pushers. Rain collectors with no real experience or heritage in Market Research. The market has been flooded with these types of companies over the last five years. As a sample buyer, clients must feel overwhelmed and confused by their options. These faux samplers can herd large flocks of online traffic and they know just enough MR vernacular to be dangerous. While their ability to access online traffic is impressive, we all know that sampling is much more than “driving traffic.” Let me be clear, sampling experts can develop and replicate complex sample frames which yield representative results; traffic pushers do not. I have to look at the bigger picture and focus on longevity and quality. “Don’t get caught up in the short-term competition,” I frequently tell myself. I have to admit, I wasn’t so strong in the past. My former CFO and board would come to me and demand savings. I would do my best to explain the long-term impacts of short-term thinking, but this fell on deaf ears. Cutting incentives by 30% doesn’t make sense. Adding routing cycles in order to increase conversion kills long-term retention.This failed routing approach produces bias and burns out participants; and yet we see both real (and faux) sampling companies doing this every day. Enough is enough. The ice caps are melting, the water is rising and most sampling companies are drowning… or merging. Same thing. So, how do we fix this?How do we increase response rates? How do we increase the pool of people who will even tolerate our surveys? In order to improve our industry’s outlook, we need to make some significant changes across the entire research ecosystem. Here are some ideas to get you thinking…

Survey design is a skill. It requires training and discipline. Just because you can program a sixty-minute survey, doesn’t mean you should. Like all things in life, we must negotiate. We must serve our clients as consultants; providing advice and evidence as to why a sixty-minute survey is an irresponsible idea.
Excluding mobile participantsfrom your sample is another damaging idea. Stop doing it. If your survey isn’t mobile-friendly, you are doing it all wrong. Wake up from your desktop coma. Mobile is happening now.
We must remember that “sample” are actually people. Let me ask you this, would you take a sixty-minute survey for $1 or the equivalent in some virtual currency? Probably not. Would you enter an endless router that holds you captive for twenty minutes only to disqualify? Probably not. We have to ask ourselves these common sense questions every day. Otherwise, we will continue to operate in an alternate universe, huddled in the fetal position waiting for a life raft!
Most panels are truly broken.They are the shards of a panel manager’s broken dreams. Okay, I know what you are thinking…maybe that is touch dramatic, but it can be a depressing job at times.

While another shard of an ancient glacier breaks off into the sea, you’ve likely finished your ice-cold beverage by now. I’m sorry if this blog drained you of your life force. The truth hurts, but being in a potentially obsolete industry hurts more. We have to make changes to reverse the damage and my team is setting out to do just that. We are redefining the user engagement model. Join me in the #MRXRevolution!

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