Articles

Panel+ 3.1 : Advanced User Tip #5

Keep your panelists happy: You can't send gifts, but emails will do.

There is a fine line between too much information and not enough. The ideal number of times to contact a panelist is somewhere in the range of 1-4 times per month. More than four contacts and many of your panelists might grow weary of you. Less than once a month and your panelists are at risk of forgetting who you are and why you are contacting them causing your response rates to slip.

But what if you know you don't have any research to conduct in the upcoming month or throughout the summer. You don't need to devise some complicated survey just for the sake of contacting your panelists. We have a much more simple idea for keeping your panelists engaged without adding too much to your workload.

Everybody likes to be remembered on their birthday!If you collected the date of birth of your panelists when you profiled them, you can set up a short email in the communications section wishing them a happy birthday. Every month create a new sample filter with only those panelists whose birth date is within that month and send them an e-card. This is a very easy way to add an extra contact to each panelist over the course of a year and at the same time keep them happy with you.

If you're new to the Communicate feature, check your user manual or call your Vision Critical representative to learn more about the new features in Panel+ 3.1.

Posted on June 26, 2005
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How Much Security is Enough?

Online Content Protection Examined.

With research firms migrating many of their core activities online, the open nature of the Internet becomes a double edged sword. While it's a strong selling point for online research that anyone, anywhere, can readily access information through a web browser, that same ability makes it difficult to ensure the security of any information placed online. This is particularly problematic with new product and entertainment research.

A recent security leak in online testing within the film industry has spooked the whole of the community into keeping their testing of movie trailers completely offline for the time being.

Many research and technology companies claim to offer completely secure media delivery technologies, and while many of these technologies often incorporate innovative content protection schemes, most, if not all, can be broken, leaving content to be downloaded, distributed and experienced by unintentional audiences. In cases where there is a breach of security, the viral nature of the Internet becomes a liability to competitive advantage.

Fully appreciating the sensitive nature of certain media files, Vision Critical offers IdeaSafe as its tool for protecting the delivery of online content to our clients' panelists. IdeaSafe secures media to prevent respondents from taking screenshots of an image or video; it also prevents respondents from decrypting files and distributing them to friends and family.

Vision Critical's current version of IdeaSafe works well to protect images and video, but we're currently working on creating a streaming version of IdeaSafe to allow for immediate viewing of videos, while keeping these videos secure from screen captures and extraction from the browser cache - this is the place on your computer where all the files you see on the web reside. When Streaming IdeaSafe is ready for market, it will allow our clients to simply upload a video file to Panel+ and securing that content with the click of a button.

Streaming IdeaSafe is currently in beta testing; this new version of IdeaSafe is built to use Windows Media Video and Macromedia Shockwave. The combination of these technologies allows Vision Critical to offer our clients a fast and secure way of delivering media files to panelists.

Posted on June 26, 2005
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E-Consultation Works, Spam Doesn’t

A European Commissioner describes the big differences in the use of e-consultation panels and email to assess public views.

Two years ago, the European Union (EU) was looking for an effective way to gauge public sentiment on a series of policy proposals. Finland's Erkki Liikanen, the European Commissioner for Enterprise and Information Society, was in charge of reviewing reactions to a draft legislation on chemicals. The task seemed daunting, with 15 nations to review, each with its own unique worries, regulations and particular plans.

The process seemed a perfect match for the use of technology. The EU established two different instruments for European citizens to voice their views: a special e-consultation panel and an email address. Liikanen's team looked to review specific concerns through dialogue, and aimed to discuss possible solutions quickly and easily.

In the end, the e-consultation panel was deemed a success. "Through the Internet enabled consultation period, we discovered that the legislation had a flaw indeed, one that would have increased costs by several billions of euros, in particular for smaller companies," said Liikanen.

The results of the email solution were not as useable. Liikanen received "around 70,000 emails in my inbox in a few days. This can destroy dialogue, it is spam, and we don't like spam." Instead of bringing people together, the email address only caused problems for the Commissioner, who was unable to effectively engage the senders.

The successful experience with panel management prompted Liikanen to implement similar tools to connect with key personnel in the continental group. "I can recall a case in the past when letters were being exchanged and signed off between about 30 people. By the end, most of the names were misspelt and two of the signatories weren't even ministers any more," said Liikanen. The use of web-enabled tools allows for a quicker process, less paperwork and faster results.

Whether the group of shareholders is a 10-member commission or a continental alliance encompassing 450 million citizens, panel management has provided exemplary results for the EU. This very same ability to instantly review results, discuss ongoing projects and assess regulations is available through Vision Critical's online panel management tool, Panel+.

Posted on June 26, 2005
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Panel+ 3.1 : Advanced User Tip #4

Find out what your panelists are really thinking - use discussion forums to create a sense of community.

Yes, No, Don't know...
Can the responses to every question you're interested in presenting to your panelists fit inside the confines of a multi-choice question or a single-choice grid? If they can, you're lucky. If not, perhaps you need a less rigid construct for gathering data.

What really makes your panelists tick? How can you get this sort of insight with out asking directly? When a study is run, we group responses together to see the panel's overall thoughts and opinions on a topic, yet we are limited by the questions that we ask. Panelists provide responses to pre-defined questions, and aren't permitted to provide insight beyond the permitted response lists. What if they were allowed to discuss concepts or topics in a more free-form environment that allowed their thoughts to flow?

Take a break from formal surveys...
It's as easy as clicking on the 'forum' tab in the Panel+ authoring tool, and it can be set up in the time it takes you to say "Yes, I would like to create a forum". Just create a forum title, enter your forum topic and hit save. That's it.

Once you start collecting data, you can log back into the administrative site and take as little or as much control as you like. You can view panelist's postings by going to the current posts tab, rearrange posts by time or by username and remove any postings that have offensive content. If you would like to steer discussion in a different direction, you can add a moderator post to re-focus panelists.

About that community thing...
Creating a sense of community will help your response rates immensely. Encourage your panelists to come back and post further messages or just to view the responses from others. Yes, it can be addictive- I'm sure those of you who read the editorial section of a newspaper daily or post your thoughts to a blog can relate. You can even send your panelists a reminder explaining how to log into the portal and re-join the discussion. Panelists can post new comments or view ones that have been added since they were last there.

Make this work for you...
The power is yours. Without a doubt, these panelists are valuable, and the more fun you make the experience, the more potential you have for generating responsive panelists. Overall, this is not only a great panel management tool, in that it entices and encourages respondents to open up, but a great qualitative research tool too.

Posted on May 9, 2005
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Response Rates in Relation to Frequency of Contact

The delicate art of keeping your panel happy, healthy, and performing.

A panel's response rate is the most frequently talked about, most visible, and most important measure of panel health. In fact, most other areas of panel management are simply measures to maintain or improve a panel's response rate. Response rates can be defined in many ways, however, the definition we generally work with on a study level is the percentage of panelist's who started a survey (which includes completes, disqualifications & those who stop part way through) amongst all who were initially sent an invitation. A panel's response rate is simply an average of the response rates of all studies conducted on the panel, over the panel's lifetime, or in the course of a particular month.

One of the keys to maintaining a high response rate is to determine the optimal frequency of contact with your panelists. Our experience has taught us that while panelists do not like to be overburdened with research requests, there is also such a thing as too little contact - a high quality panel is about creating a relationship with your panelists and if they are only contacted two or three times a year it is hard to build that relationship.

Each panel is unique, and will respond in different ways, however, our philosophy is that in most cases, panelists should be invited to participate in research, or contacted in some way, between 14 and 20 times per year. Bear in mind, this does not mean that panelists should actually complete this many surveys each year. In our experience, response rates vary from 35% to 60%, which equates to panelists completing anywhere from 4 to 9 surveys a year.

This recommendation does not mean that you can only conduct 14 to 20 studies per year with your panel, but that you should have 14 to 20 actual contacts with each of your panelists. So unless you are surveying your entire panel every time you launch a study, you will either need to conduct a multitude of studies over the course of the year, or come up with other contact methods. If you find you are having difficulty maintaining this level of contact there are several options we recommend:

• Use an existing survey. For example, you may have conducted a study with females 25-34 on your panel which, once completed and with a few simple wording changes, could be sent to the entire panel, or to a select group of under-utilized panelists, and serve as a point of contact.
• Create a Dummy Survey. Panelists love fun surveys so put on your creative hat or enlist our help and come up with 5 to 10 "just for fun" questions and send it out to keep your panelists engaged. For blind panels this is also an excellent way to maintain your anonymity - how about creating a survey about a competitor's product?
• Newsletters count too! Remember that any contact with your panelists counts, not just surveys, and a newsletter serves the purpose just as well. This is especially useful if it is the entire panel that has been neglected.

If you find you are consistently exceeding the optimal number of contacts over the course of several months, you need to consider what actions you can take before your panelists become over burdened and lose their patience with the panel.

• Inappropriate Panel size. If you find it is the entire panel, or close to the entire panel, that is being over-utilized perhaps you don't have the optimal panel size for the research you are doing. It may be time to re-evaluate your needs and determine how many more you need to recruit in order to decrease the level of burden on your panelists.
• Optimal Panel Distribution. If it is a specific demographic group that is being frequently contacted perhaps it is the distribution of your panel that needs to be altered. For example, you may be surveying your young males every week but haven?t contacted anyone over 55 in months. It is likely that you need to boost up the young male group and either purge or let the 55+ group slowly taper off rather than continue trying to keep panelists on board that you never use and exhausting the ones that you do.
• Offer up incentives. Alternatively, if you feel it may be a passing trend that you are over contacting your panelists you may want to consider temporarily increasing your incentives to offset the number of contacts they are receiving and to make staying worth their while.

To help you stay on top of all this, we have added a panel usage report to the latest version of Panel+. This report outlines Panel Size, Response Rates and Frequency of Contact on a monthly basis so that with just a quick click of the mouse, you can determine whether your panel is being optimally utilized. For help with this report, or to discuss your panel's health, please contact your account manager today.

Posted on May 9, 2005
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