Writing Survey Invitations: Six Points to Cover

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Writing Survey Invitations: Six Points to Cover

Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Feb 09, 2009

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I've been reading Patrick Glaser's "A Playbook for Creating Survey Introductions for Online Panels". Among other things, he provides a useful outline for a survey invitation, along with example phrases.

	Example 1	Example 2
Intro/Basic Appeal	Your Opinion Counts!	You've been selected for a research study!
Importance of Participation	Your participation in this survey will help improve products and services	Your participation in this survey will help make improvements to a government program
Survey Subject Matter	We'd like to know your thoughts about gasoline prices	We'd like to know your thoughts about dairy products
Flexibility/Time Burden	We only need to ask you about 10 questions	This survey will only take a few moments of your time
Incentive Offered for Participation	Participate and $5 will be credited to the credit card of your choice	Get a free copy of the results after you participate!
Privacy/Data Confidentiality	As member of the Better Business Bureau we take your privacy seriously and will respect your confidentiality	Your privacy is important to us, your answers will be combined with others, and will never be linked with you personally

To see the affect of key phrases and concepts on response rate, Glaser tested randomly-generated invitations using a bank of six phrases per section. It's a useful reference for anyone who regularly writes survey invitations to panelists: it's free to CMOR (Council For Marketing and Opinion Research) members, $25 for non-CMOR members. Request the "Respondent Cooperation Playbook".

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Tags: Survey Research