Oliver Conner
There are a variety of skills used in the building and maintaining of an online panel. Broadly speaking, these skills fall into two areas – panel management and community management.
The panel manager works closely with data, performs a variety of checks and is responsible for improving the overall quality of the panel. The community manager is responsible for communicating with the panel, listening to their complaints and ensuring that the panellists feel valued.
Here are 15 tips and considerations for improving an online research panel from both a panel and community managers’ perspective:
- User Experience: It is of vital importance that all parts of the respondent experience is as comfortable as any website is, and as easy to navigate as possible. Pay particular attention to the panel sign-up process and avoid capturing too much information at this early stage.
- Build and use a panellist profile: One of the top irritations that panellists suffer is being screened out from a survey. This can be avoided by storing data and ensuring that you only direct surveys towards respondents that fit the correct criteria. Storing a comprehensive profile with a large collection of data points can prevent you from having to ask a respondent the same question twice.
- Seek out zigzaggers and flatliners: These are respondents that answer surveys in a recognisable pattern (a straight line or a zigzag pattern). There are automated tools that can highlight unusual patterns in data but it is also possible to find them using a manual approach in Excel.
- Find the speeders: By monitoring each respondent’s time taken to complete a survey you can work out a mean survey completion time and investigate any outliers. It is important to remember that some people are much faster than others at completing a survey. It is also advisable to monitor respondents IP addresses to ensure that people are logging in from the location they say they are.
- Monitor open text questions: The amount of effort that respondents put into an open field text box is a good indication of their level of engagement. Ensure that you recognise well considered responses and flag any that don’t provide useful data.
- Choose the right kind of incentive: There are a range of incentives available to a panel manager including micro-payments and prize draws. It is important to pay the right amount to a respondent to show them that you value their time. Other possible incentives include letting the respondents know the outcome of the survey, or donating money to charity.
- Recruit from diverse sources: Ensuring that you recruit from a range of areas will increase the demographic spread of your panel and help it become more representative. Use ‘refer a friend’ schemes to ask people to recommend work colleagues and family members.
- Survey limits: Put a cap on the amount of surveys a respondent can take within a period of time. This will prevent them rushing through a survey and stop them becoming professional survey takers.
- Survey quality: Aim to use short, interesting and well-crafted surveys. Try to use fun and interactive question types such as sliding scales, drag and drop and image based questions to make things more exciting.
- Make your panel feel valued: Use language that assures the panellist that their contribution is important. Remind them that their feedback will be used for crucial business decisions and that they will be making a difference. Also consider rewarding panellists that have been with you for a year or send them a birthday message.
- Keep panel calendars and logs: Schedule regular dummy surveys to check panel health and remember to regularly update any stored profile information. You should also schedule the removal of dormant respondents and measure attrition and survey drop-out rates.
- Engage with them: Panellists that have opted in to be a part of a research panel are often eager to contribute beyond just answering survey responses. Tap into their creative potential and ask for their help in both generating and inspiring new ideas and concepts.
- Give your panel an identity: Brand your panel by using graphics, logos and characters to help bring a sense of personality to your online environment. This is something that can be used on any email invitations and can also be rolled out across any social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
- Listen to complaints: Provide plenty of opportunities for your panellists to feedback any problems they have. It is advisable to have a FAQ section to save your time spent replying to emails concerning common problems. Pay particular attention to complaints made on social media as they are usually public.
- Create a community: Do some surveys just for fun and post the results on a Facebook page or a blog. Encourage your panellists to leave their comments and engage with each other. Remember that people like structure, so ensure that any community activity is scheduled and given an allocated time of the week.
Running a panel is a balancing act between thinking of your members as your customers and as your employees. In one sense, you need to work hard to keep them doing business with you, and in another sense you demand a certain level of quality from them.
These are 15 tips, can you think of any others?
Oliver Conner is Head of Innovation at OnePoll
