Amongst all the talk in Montreux about corporate social responsibility was some interesting discussion about how Web survey researchers also might develop a little social responsibility of their own.
First, there is Research-Voice.com. This is the brainchild of Kees de Jong (now CEO at SSI) who for the last couple of years has been championing what he calls a “respondent preservation initiative.” The concept is simple. Without respondents there can be no surveys and so it is in the best interests of the industry to recognize that they are not a commodity to be used, abused, and cast off when we are done with them. We need to put respondents front and center and treat them with respect in all of our interactions with them. I certainly have spent some time in this space ranting about poor survey design and its impact on both respondents and response quality. It’s a serious problem and Research-Voice tries to draw attention to it as well as encourage research-on-research aimed at improving the respondent experience. Check it out.
Then there is the “Pause for a Cause” initiative launched by the CMO Council. The idea here is to create a panel in which incentives go not into the respondents’ pockets but to charities of their choosing. The goal is to redirect at least some of the money spent on online research into charitable donations. Needless to say, this idea has received a less than warm welcome by at least some companies in the panel business. Researchers also are expressing some concern that the motivations to join this panel (you can check it out here) might result in a whole new set of biases in its samples. A colleague has suggest that the better approach might be to offer the infrastructure to channel incentives to charities to all panel companies rather than launching a whole new panel composed of people with a sense of social responsibility.
I am rooting for Research-Voice to succeed but share the worries about bias in Surveyforgood. I like my colleague’s suggestion about repositioning it as a service rather than a separate panel.