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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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