Web Surveys with the SurveyShop Research Team
February 2002
Speed is the essence on the Internet. In a medium where things change daily and last month seems like last year, surveys are a vital way to keep track of what is happening out there. It is equally vital that surveys move quickly. But the devil is in the detail, and when speed turns into haste, it’s the essential details that can get overlooked and render the survey useless, or worse, provide misleading results.
SurveyShop's consultants will advise on survey design issues, provide solutions to tricky technical or programming problems or develop custom functions or applications to integrate with the Snap software suite.
Though Snap makes it easy to get a survey up and running quickly, many of Snap's customers are finding that a little help from Snap SurveyShop is a wise investment in ensuring everything goes to plan. SurveyShop's consultants will advise on survey design issues, provide solutions to tricky technical or programming problems or develop custom functions or applications to integrate with the Snap software suite. They can provide assistance at every stage of the process, from writing the questions to presenting the results.
In each of the case studies we feature here, two highly capable and experienced organizations found it essential to enlist the help of SurveyShop's Research Team in order to move high profile projects forward quickly, reliably and with complete professionalism.
Case study 1 - TRBI Market Research. Projecting the right image goes hi-tech with Snap
One of the UK’s leading research agencies has opted for a Snap-powered solution, custom built by SurveyShop's Research Team for an innovative image-based consumer research exercise. Despite the wide variety of research services provided by TRBI (The Research Business International) to its diverse mix of clients using its own in-house systems and resources, SurveyShop were called in to provide a solution to a challenging hi-tech survey. In this multi-country and multi-agency study, respondents are to be shown several hundred images and asked to rate them. To ensure comparability of results, it is vital that each image is shown for precisely the same length of time and under identical conditions.
Aisling Bowman, International Quantitative Research Director at TRBI in London, needed to find a solution that would allow all the different research agencies, using varying equipment and research software, to be able to conduct comparable interviews while allowing her to co-ordinate the entire project without needing to send a technician to every agency to ensure the technology worked. She decided that a web-based solution would be best, as this was not software dependent and would be easy for the different agencies to operate. Her IT Director was familiar with Snap and suggested she contact SurveyShop.
"We initially exchanged e-mail's with Snap Surveys, looking for a suggestion on how to do it," Aisling explained. "We then commissioned the job and after that, defined what we needed in more detail. From our point of view, it was great to find people who could speak to us in the language we could understand. We developed a good relationship with the programmer who was also quite easy to communicate with - which is often a problem with these technical guys"
Though the brief continued to develop and the work became more technically demanding, TRBI’s consultants at Snap Surveys continued to overcome the new challenges that arose.
Though the brief continued to develop and the work became more technically demanding, TRBI’s consultants at Snap Surveys continued to overcome the new challenges that arose. These included handling the different video resolutions various agencies would be using in order that the images were always the same size on screen. Another challenge was to incorporate a complex multi-level randomization of the images to counteract possible respondent fatigue.
"Every time we came up against a problem they were extremely patient with us," Aisling reported. "And when they came to us with a question, they’d help us find the answers too. They were really quite proactive."
To combat slow downloads over the Internet, the images are being distributed on CD ROM, but the data will be returned over the Internet. Despite both the newness and complexity of the project, the first field tests went off without any hitches - and without the need to send a technician on site, saving a lot of cost and effort.
"I would definitely recommend SurveyShop." said Aisling. "Our experiences have been really encouraging. Our brief to them was ‘make it look nice’, and it does look most professional. It has given us an opportunity to do something which is cost effective and in a novel way too."
Case study 2 - English Nature. Timely research makes for a more interesting habitat on the web.
English Nature, the government agency responsible for championing the conservation of wildlife and geology throughout the England, has completed a review of its website, first launched five years ago. After four years of organic growth and a re-launch a year ago, this large, highly informative site attracts a substantial number of visitors.
To learn more about its visitors and their needs, and to engage in some market testing, the agency decided it was time for a systematic online survey. According to John Lincoln, English Nature’s Head of Publicity and Marketing, "The survey has provided some significant findings for us to respond to. It was very timely."
Conducting the survey online made a lot of sense, although setting it up and dealing with the technicalities were beyond the resources of English Nature. The agency invited bids from several firms qualified to carry out the work, awarding the contract to Snap Surveys a new supplier to English Nature as its proposal offered what John Lincoln described as the best "value for money", when balancing cost against the substance of each proposal.
SurveyShop's Research Team worked with English Nature to design and set up the web survey. It also worked out the best way to achieve a random sample of 1000 visitors by using a pop-up survey on exit from the site.
SurveyShop's Research Team worked with English Nature to design and set up the web survey. It also worked out the best way to achieve a random sample of 1000 visitors by using a pop-up survey on exit from the site.
The survey operated on SurveyShop's dedicated web server, blending seamlessly with the English Nature site. Though three weeks were planned for interviews to accumulate, a fourth week was required to achieve the total required. By this time, it was running close to Christmas. Nevertheless, the initial report was ready almost immediately for English Nature’s marketing team to digest for the New Year.
Encouragingly, the survey revealed high levels of satisfaction with the site. John Lincoln commented: "What came out was that we seemed to be getting it right, on the whole presenting a great deal of what people wanted, but there were some specific notes for improvements."
These included comments about improving the site search facilities, more information about nature reserves and more maps. The agency also learned a lot about the changing profile of its users compared to a survey one year after the site launched.
Early in January, English Nature’s communication steering group held a strategic planning workshop, and SurveyShop’s lead consultant on the project, Tim Markham, was asked to attend, even though this was not part of the original brief.
John observed: "It was advantageous to have the results as we could present them at the beginning of the workshop. Some of our senior management, who were late arriving, were given a personal presentation from Tim, which was useful as these were people we needed to impress. This was indeed added value!"
Just a few weeks after the last web interview was done, a new blueprint has been developed for continuing improvements to the English Nature site, including many of the changes suggested by the research. It is what John Lincoln means when he says the results were ‘timely’.
Commitment and flexibility
The "extreme patience" that Aisling Bowman reports is not simply courtesy: it is an active demonstration of the SurveyShop approach to problem solving, based on listening carefully to what the client wants and meeting that need in a flexible and imaginative way. In delivering well crafted, appropriate solutions, SurveyShop' clients profit from the team’s considerable knowledge and understanding of the software, the technology and the whole research process.
In English Nature’s case, the project benefited greatly from the input SurveyShop’s consultants were able to provide into the research design, as well as the speed at which they were able to move. Accommodating the client’s request to present the findings to senior management was, in the consultant’s view, part of the job, even though it was not in the brief.
For TRBI, there were a number of interesting technical issues to solve. An automatic page progression feature was custom developed to allow researchers to control the length of time each image was displayed. Various optimizations were carried out to ensure pages and images loaded very fast, exploiting advanced features of both Snap and web browser technology. Great care was taken over screen design, and the randomization techniques to reduce the risk of undue influence on respondent’s perception of the images. Very thorough testing, and tight integration with the tried and tested Snap software ensured extreme reliability in the field.
Web surveys can often require a level of technical skill and know-how not easily acquired from more traditional research.
In both cases, getting the job done fast and providing the flexibility to make numerous changes along the way did not stand in the way of doing it properly. Web surveys can often require a level of technical skill and know-how not easily acquired from more traditional research. The technicalities can be daunting even to experienced researchers. The SurveyShop Research Team is adept at bridging whatever gaps you may have in skill, resource or experience to ensure any web survey will succeed from both research and the technological perspectives. And as you now know, they won’t make you feel like a fool in the process!
English Nature’s website can be viewed at www.english-nature.org