{"id":7658,"date":"2013-10-07T06:37:21","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T13:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.questionpro.com\/?p=7658"},"modified":"2023-08-03T06:39:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T06:39:19","slug":"driving-respondent-participation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.questionpro.com\/blog\/driving-respondent-participation\/","title":{"rendered":"A Real Life Market Research Plan: Driving Respondent Participation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Driving Respondent Participation<\/h2>\n

\"Driving<\/a>I’ve been sharing a real life case-study of a manufacturer who HAD to create a market research plan in order to start collecting feedback from its distributors. All we had to do know was figure out exactly what ‘easy to work with’ looked like for our distributors and their customers.<\/p>\n

The short skippy (if you haven’t been following along) is that a manufacturer of industrial me-too widgets decided to differentiate themselves by creating the “best overall customer experience” for their distributors and their end users. \u00a0The only problem with this — is that they didn’t know what a “best experience” looked like. \u00a0To find out, they decided to do some research.<\/p>\n

But that turned out to be a little harder than they thought. \u00a0They started with a Ning Community and then decided to create an online survey panel. \u00a0But before they could even begin asking questions — they had to BUILD the community so that they had a statistically significant number of people who would answer survey questions and provide reliable decision making data.<\/p>\n

Today, I’m going to share how we started building our respondent base<\/strong><\/p>\n

Creating a community<\/h2>\n

Our first challenge was getting all the distributors into one place. \u00a0We started by creating a Ning Community and recruiting distributors into that space where they can ask questions and we can answer them. \u00a0This is our version of social media. \u00a0If you are in a broader market or industry, you may simply choose to use a closed Facebook or LinkedIn group to accomplish the same thing.<\/p>\n

Our next goal was to create an online panel of distributors where we can start running online surveys and digging into the data so that we can understand any trends and start segmenting and filtering the responses.<\/p>\n

Driving respondent participation into the community<\/strong><\/h2>\n

One of the biggest challenges we had was getting people to join the Ning Community and the survey panel. \u00a0These guys (more than 90% of our audience is men) didn’t spend a lot of time next to a computer, they were in their cars, traveling and making sales calls. \u00a0That means we had to create incentives to join the community and more incentives to participate.<\/p>\n

We decided to run a sales contest and to manage the points via the online survey panel. \u00a0This way, if they wanted to win prizes, they had to participate in surveys.<\/p>\n

That strategy was somewhat successful, \u00a0we got about 80% of the distributors into the panel with that one. \u00a0But we didn’t get all of them — AND — our response rates were dismal to say the least.<\/p>\n

LEARN ABOUT:<\/strong> What Is A Panel Survey?<\/a><\/p>\n

We made mistakes — here are just a few — DON’T do this!<\/h2>\n

Needless to say — we made mistakes. \u00a0The first mistake we made was NOT telling people exactly what we were doing — MULTIPLE times.<\/p>\n

We sent out an email and put announcements in the Ning Community. \u00a0But that wasn’t NEARLY enough. \u00a0Here what would have been better:<\/p>\n