Welcome to the Listening Post!

Panel Recruitment Lessons from Panel Professionals

In our Lessons from Professional Panel Providers study, the panels with open membership cast a wide net to recruit panelists. Sources they use include:

• Media web sites
• Banner ads
• Public-relations campaigns
• Co-registration at partner websites
• Targeted emails sent by partners
• Postal mail invitations
• TV ads
• Trade shows
• Affiliate networks
• Search-engine marketing
• Social networks

Panel providers can get quite creative when seeking sources for target populations with low usage of the Internet. Since few Chinese rural migrant workers are online, Data 100 has partnered with a social agency to reach this population. Market Xcel in India uses in-person recruitment and intercept surveys at cyber cafes across the subcontinent. If Knowledge Networks has randomly selected a household to participate in its panel, the firm will provide Internet access if needed and will even provide a laptop PC if the household lacks a computer that can go online.

As part of recruitment, panel providers ask new panelists to complete detailed profiles. Common elements of such profiles include personal demographics, household demographics, employment attributes, occupational details, buying behavior and technology usage (esp. Internet usage).

Panel providers often use the demographic information from profiles to confirm the identity of panelists. Sources cross-referenced include:

• Physical address records
• IP addresses
• Telephone records
• Mobile phone numbers
• Birthday records
• Credit databases
• Financial records when paying out incentives
• AMA registry and EU medical directories (for medical panels)

In order to make sure panelists do not join the panel multiple times, under aliases or different email addresses, panel providers turn to sample databases such as TrueSample and Optimus Research Database:

• TrueSample - "Provides provides objective assurance that survey respondents are real, unique, and engaged."
• Optimus Research Database - "Optimus^TM eliminates duplicates and respondent fraud in high value market research projects such as B2B and healthcare surveys."

What Panel Pros Can Teach Us about Panel Recruitment

What can those of us running in-house panels learn from panel professionals for recruiting?

1. Field detailed profile surveys. As the last stage of recruitment, encourage panelists to complete a basic profile. Periodically invite them to complete more detailed profiles as well. Build a full picture of your panelists so that you can precisely target future surveys to them.
2. Make sure to confirm offline identity for sensitive research. For customer research, validate that panelists are in fact customers. For confidential research into product concepts, make certain to blacklist competitors-or at least blacklist their domain names.
3. Deduplicate recruits. Make sure that new recruits aren't already listed as members of the panel.

Want to learn more? For the full results of this study, download our white paper, Panel Management Secrets: Lessons from the Professionals, or view our recorded research webinar of the same name.