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Panel Management Lessons from Panel Professionals

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Many unscrupulous sites, typically unaffiliated with the panel providers themselves, champion that you can make easy money at home taking surveys, and this drives a lot of panelists to sign up with mercenary intentions.

What sort of incentives are offered panelists? In our Lessons from Professional Panel Providers study, 47% of the panels have point-based systems that can be redeemed for gifts, gift certificates or cash. Another 47% pay in vouchers and gift cards, with 27% offering cash for surveys. Thirty percent (30%) offer donations to a charity of the panelist's choice. Financial incentives for survey results end up creating significant concerns about the quality of survey answers (see Data Quality & Validation Lessons).

Incentive philosophies and approaches vary widely from panel provider to panel provider:

• "The incentives have been set to encourage long term participation but also to discourage participation for payment purposes only." - Cint
• "Even though incentives are offered, panelists are unlikely to net any significant amount of money in the aggregate during the year based on limited frequency of participation." - Nielsen
• "Points systems are recognized as being the best in class in online market research, as they are seen as a neutral system which does not skew the participation of specific groups of people." - Ipsos Mori
• "SSI's philosophy is not to use a ‘one size fits all' reward system. Instead, SSI offers the reward which best suits a specific survey project and that is most likely to appeal to a diverse community of respondents." - SSI
• "From our viewpoint this is very much ‘horses for courses', meaning that incentives should vary to the circumstance and objective of the survey. We do not presently have a ‘loyalty' scheme - we vary the incentive according to the project." - Sample Answers
• "The incentive varies between two to three dollars per minute based upon specialty and length of survey." - MDLinx (panel of healthcare professionals) [non-medical surveys, in contrast, typically are $2-3 per survey]
• "In certain cases (certain unique target groups) the incentive could be a product, tickets or a subscription that is relevant to the nature of the target group." - Focus Suites
• "Peanut Labs offers community based incentives that are different for every respondent - think of it as a customized incentive based on personal preferences and affinity. These incentives are controlled by the social network or community partner that the respondent comes from." - Peanut Labs

Panels reported that 11% of panelists on average left the panel each year. To minimize this attrition, panels limit the number of surveys that a panelist can take anywhere from 1 survey per month to 8 surveys per month, with 3.5 per month being the average.

What Panel Pros Can Teach Us about Panel Management

1. Limit the number of surveys to 1 or 2 per panelist per month. Almost a quarter of the panels that specified a limit claim not to survey panelists more than once a month on average. If that is a good practice for professional panels, it seems like excellent advice for panels of customers.
2. Calculate annualized attrition rate as a KPI. The rate of members unsubscribing from the panel is an excellent Key Performance Indicator: high attrition diminishes the representativeness of the panel and is a sign that you are inviting members to surveys too often and typically to surveys that are too long.
3. Provide awards not rewards. Incentive systems can corrupt data quality; such systems are necessary for general purpose panels where the panel has no pre-existing relationship with the panelists, but financial incentives should not be necessary when researching customers. Customers agree to take surveys out of social norms rather than market norms; accordingly, instead of promising rewards for future behavior provide awards to recognize past survey-taking behavior. Sharing top-line results is an especially effective thank you for completing a survey.

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.