Respondent Incentives Blog

[jberri12]

I was doing some research this morning to see if there are any industry standards for respondent incentives.  I'm sure some of you have seen the "CASRO" logo on panels sites - this organization provides oversight to the market research community and guidelines on how to do their research.  If they are a CASRO member they are supposed to follow these guidelines.

Surprisingly I could not find any info on the CASRO site on actual incentives, only that they need to be "transparent" and compensation is allowed as long as it doesn't skew research data.  With a little more digging I found the following blog article from a company called Innovate MR.

The article I found makes very interesting reading: Ins and Outs of Respondent Incentives.  The discussion of non-qualifying activities is telling and one of my pet peeves about panels and compensation.  I wish all market research companies would follow the guidelines discussed in the article!  I think we would all be a lot happier being respondents as a result.

Bottom line is it provides some insight on how these research companies perceive us and how they should (but often don't) interact. This company seems to get it where most of the other companies do not.

 

[dugb]

Very interesting reading. 

Another incentive that could be considered is a partial reimbursement for surveys terminated after a cutoff point (60-70%?) when you get awarded possibly 10-15% of full reward.

Not only would it encourage the panellists to 'feel good' but would cut back on the number of surveys where one feels they are simply provided to keep you on their site, but that have NO chance of completion.

I must admit that Mintvine are moving a little that way, I've received several 'Sorry you don't qualify but here's 3, 6, 9 pts for your trouble.  Makes you more inclined to try ALL their surveys

[Spazmobot]

On 5/17/2017 at 3:13 AM, dugb said:

I must admit that Mintvine are moving a little that way, I've received several 'Sorry you don't qualify but here's 3, 6, 9 pts for your trouble.  Makes you more inclined to try ALL their surveys

Yes, I agree.  I stopped doing Mintvine for a while when they decided to just give you surveys in a row blind, not letting you choose which ones you want to take, to try to force people to take the undsireables like 20 min for 10 cents, etc.  I've been coming back lately since they got rid of that horrid policy.  

You know, if you're a company, and you're having trouble getting people to fill out certain surveys, hmmm, maybe it means you're not valuing your participants properly.  I'm guessing Mintvine changed to a more reasonable policy of giving us the choice to skip again because of complaints.  The good panels listen to their participants.

~Sidenote about MintVine: I noticed the last time I cashed out that I can now epect my money in closer to a week, rather than 2 days, (4 days if over the weekend,) that was standard at my last cashout.  Now, fine whatever, but you know what they did?  I looked at my cashout history, and all my previous cashouts have request to receive times of a week as well.  So, they changed my old cashouts to look like it's always been a week to wait for the money.  Cuz, you know, I'm stupid, apparently.  Not cool.

It's a short but apt article.  I think I did an innovatemr panel before.  It was a temporary one for a few days, but was enjoyable.  Seems they have their policies on straight.  Wish more did.

[love1978]

I am just tired of the surveys where you answer 20-30 questions and then they state that you are not qualified.