NewMR key themes part 1: respondent engagement

By Jon Beaumont, Business Development Director

In preparation for a recent webinar for Virtual Surveys, I reviewed most of the presentations given at the NewMR conference held in December 2010 (details here). This blog post is the first of a short series that will discuss some of the key themes of the conference which I found interesting. (Btw, this won’t be a comprehensive review of all the conference content, and I would certainly recommend that you pay (only!) £20 to download and peruse the content yourself – details here.)

First up is engaging participants - how do we find and engage with people when modes of communication are changing so dramatically?

Betty Admaou at Nebu gave a vibrant presentation focused on the Facebook generation. She spoke about how email is NOT a primary communication method for young people. They might use it to communicate for work or with their University, but most of the time there’ll be using alternative modes of communication. Betty felt that that the most important of these is Facebook and gave the example of people asking friends to ‘Facebook me’, not ‘email me’. She also spoke about other forms of digital communications including Twitter and IM.

Of course, this has implications for researchers. It makes people harder to reach via email. Also, these quick, short form communication methods make long surveys very unappealing.

So, what’s the solution? Well, Betty had three suggestions:

• Grab their attention – reach out to them with something impactful
• Speak their language, especially the under 25s
• Get an app, get on social networks

All this certainly chimes with the work we are doing at Virtual Surveys. We predominantly use email to reach out to people, to engage them with surveys or involve them in qualitative research online (focus groups or communities). However, we will also use alternatives as and when they are required, including Facebook engagement, calls to action on open forums (you need a friendly forum owner to do this) and employing mobile techniques, such as mobile surveys.

Betty’s presentation was echoed by John Dick from Civil Science. To engage respondents in a social media world we need to:

• Go to them – reach out and actively engage
• Keep it brief – like under 30 seconds. (John spoke about engaging with many people on many occasions in short bursts across a period of time)
• Make it relevant and valuable. Respondents need to feel they have got something out of what they do
• Use technology to connect and organise answers. This fits with point 2 – if you are engaging in short bursts over time, across multiple platforms, then you need to collate and aggregate the data

John’s presentation got me thinking about what we do at Virtual Surveys and what online communities offer. They can engage and reward audiences in a way that suits them, in terms of language, frequency and type of contact (e.g. survey, discussion, blog, live chat, etc). Plus, they offer the chance to learn iteratively in small steps, building towards a ‘bigger picture’.

Next time, I discuss online surveys, focusing on top tips to make them more effective.