If you are paying a fee per-respondent to a panel company then you will need to be able to manage the type of people that can participate in your study. This will involve setting up screening questions and quotas, an area where many of the DIY survey tools fall short.

Although a panel company will direct its members they think are qualified to take part in the research to the survey, our advice is to double check by asking the basic profile questions in a survey screener, (gender, region, age etc). When creating a screening page it should not be made obvious who is being targeted. I see a lot of surveys with screeners along the lines of ‘Have you bought a car in the last 6 months?’. Guess what? A lot of people are going to answer ‘Yes’ whether they have or not because they want to collect the points!

A better strategy is to bury your screening questions amongst others. So for instance, ‘Which of the following have you done in the last 6 months?’ should be followed by a list of 10 – 15 activities of which ‘Buying a car’ is just one. You should reject any that ticks more than say, half the boxes. Once a respondent has been rejected they should not be able to retry the screener and pass with different answers. It sounds obvious but we see a lot of examples of this happening in the market.

When setting quotas they should be pitched at a level that provides the quality of data sought but not be so inflexible as to make it extremely difficult to fill. It can increase the cost of the sample considerably if very strict quota specifications are made when something a little more relaxed would cost less and still deliver the research quality needed. For instance, its best to avoid being in a position where we have to find a 72 year old, left-handed, female, green Ford Mondeo Driver from Ipswich that won the bingo last Wednesday. Unless we really have to!

The ORS Standard Survey Package provides full screening and quota management facilities by default.