From DIY Surveys to DIT (Do It Together) Surveys
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sun, Mar 21, 2010
Panel management provides an excellent opportunity to improve the quality of the Do It Yourself survey research done by your coworkers. The initial problem of oversurveying customers has led to a resultant decline in response rates. Once your organization realizes it has a problem, a tragedy of the commons of shared respondents, a panel manager can begin overseeing that commons for sustainability, empaneling customers and controlling access to them for surveys.
The panel manager's primary role, relative to coworkers, is scheduling and allocating access to subsets of the panel for particular survey projects. This now provides an excuse for reviewing the survey before it is fielded and provides an opportunity to improve it. The panel manager can talk with the author to better understand the goals of the research and then review the questionnaire to make sure it can meet those goals. The panel manager can also review that the survey follows best practices for questionnaire design and that the survey invitations are well crafted. All of a sudden the panel manager is collaborating with the Do It Yourselfers helping them to do a better job.
Panel management can be the first step towards enterprise feedback management and a move from DIY surveys to Do It Together surveys.