For this particular module, we're going to talk about our specific strategies for increasing response rates by making the benefits of participation in a survey more clear to your potential respondents. So, if you remember in the last module we talked about social exchange. People will volunteer their effort including to your survey if the cost and benefit ratio is right for them or the cost of the survey low but also are the benefits good. All right. How do you signal the benefit of participating in a survey to the people that you want to encourage to participate. Highlighting the benefits of participating in a survey is an important technique that people often forget. I think as survey researchers we often focus on reducing the costs for participants. We don't think about how it's going to benefit the participant, how can we show them that it's actually going to be an enjoyable experience. A few specific techniques that we're going to walk through and talk about. So, first specify how the survey results will be useful. People are wonderfully altruistic. They actually want to help other people. If you say that the survey's going to benefit you and you can say that maybe it would make them more aware of their behaviors, maybe it will help to highlight things that they're interested in. But in general you can also say, look if you participate in the survey is going to help us improve the product or improved this service for other people. People often respond to this kind of altruistic incentive that they have. You can also provide specifics about that. Something as vague as this will help other people is not likely to have much traction. Like you say we're going to use this to inform a new design of our website that will help people who come to the site for their needs. Things like that can show that their answers and the responses to your survey are actually going to have a lot of weight and might lead to future benefit for other people. This seems obvious, but you can also ask interesting questions. One of the rookie mistakes I often see that people make is they put their boring questions up front and often that's demographics. All right. I know demographics are important for a lot of what you want to do but often people have answered those so many times on surveys. It's not something that they really enjoy. Now they're easy to answer and we're going to talk later in this series about what types of questions are easy versus hard but in general you want to start off with, what's those thing you really want to know about, what was the topic of the survey that got the participant interested in the first place. It's also important that you identify the trustworthiness of your sponsoring organization, either yourself or who are you working for. People get so many requests from surveys and opt-in who's asking is so obscured behind the technology where we're asking people to participate that they don't know who to trust or what's legitimate requests versus illegitimate requests or scams even. How do you let people know that your organization under your client are going to use their data with care and respect. If for instance you're an independent researcher or you don't have an organization that you think people are recognize, what types of partnerships might you form with other organizations that could boost trust. Some types of organizations have a lot of trust and some don't. So, for instance the government despite people's feelings about the government sometimes, people are fairly where the government is going to be careful with their data. Same with universities, especially universities within their own state. If you can hook up with a non-profit to increase your own trustworthiness, that's a good way to boost trust from your participants. Another good way to really get people to participate is to make them feel like their participation is valuable. One of the things that we see when respondents say no is they think I don't have anything to say about this or they'll just move on to the next person if I say no. You need to overcome these social loafing tendencies that people have when it comes to surveys. Social loafing comes from the social psychology literature. It basically means that if you're in a group, you anticipate somebody else in the group is going to contribute effort to a collaborative activity. In survey world, that means that if you have a convenience sample and I see your requests to participate in your survey, I will just reject that request because I figure if somebody else is going to help you out. It helps to highlight the unique value of the person. I need your experiences because you represent this group of users that I'm really interested in or you've just had this experience in our software and we really need to know what you think. Another way to highlight the rarity of the survey response is to set deadlines to avoid participant procrastination. If you just have an open-ended request to come participate in the survey, people are going to prioritize other things in their lives. If you make a deadline for a time they have to participate by, that will help them make a decision and get past these heuristics of how they make choices about how to spend their time. Another good way to encourage participation is to create a norm of participation. Let your potential respondents know that others have responded to the survey. People like you have helped us by answering these questions and helping improve the experiences for all of our members or you want to create an expectation that people like your potential respondent have already participated and help them again overcome these heuristics of whether or not it's a good idea to participate in this survey. A way to do that and a way to help enforce these norms is to let participants see other people's results. Now this is sometimes impossible and it's not a technique you can use all the time. But if you have the data and you can help a participants see what other people are scoring in the survey, people are really interested in social comparison. If they can compare themselves against other people, they're really interested and might be more likely to participate so they can get the result that thereafter. So, let's take a moment and think about the special case for increasing the benefit of participating in a survey and that's where I think everybody's head goes to immediately, and that's the case of incentives. Can I give you money or something to participate in my survey. You can use cash and material incentives to encourage reciprocity. Now you want to be careful here. You want to make sure that your inclusion of these cash or prizes or gifts trigger social exchange not economic exchange. If you offer money to participate in a survey, that triggers a whole different set of calculations about how people spend their time. Is my hourly relate worth what you're asking me to do versus am I helping this person do it a favor. They've express their appreciation of me by giving me a little token incentive. Now I will express my appreciation of them by doing their survey. All right. That's the underlying goal of operating incentives. It's not to pay a person necessarily for participating in the survey, is to encourage them to participate by creating this feeling of reciprocity and a mutual relationship between the respondent and the surveyor. There has been as you can imagine, a ton of research work but what types of incentives are effective and which ones aren't. There's a few general categories of this that is worth talking about. So, token cash incentives provided in advance of doing the survey had a substantial positive effect on survey response. That means that if you offer a small incentive before people even respond, you're going to get a higher response rate. Now what is a token incentive? How much is that? The optimal rate for mail surveys where you can't ask people to participate and send them money ahead of time is about two dollars. Much more than that and you get drop-off rates really quickly. So, you could offer $20 to participate in the survey, but that's surprisingly not that much more effective than two dollars and that's partially because again you're triggering this reciprocity feeling not a monetary exchange feeling. Small amounts can really increase your response rates. Gifts or schwag, little prizes from a company may be given before the survey was less effective than cash, but still fairly effective. If you give not money but actual maybe a pen or whatever schwag you have on hand before the survey, that will also increase response rates. Cash given after the survey was less effective than either money or material goods given before the survey. That's partially again because you're triggering a different response there. If it's cash for work, that's a different set of feelings that a person has as opposed to creating this social exchange that offering the incentive upfront has. A common method and a method that is least effective amongst your incentive techniques is the lottery. If you participate in the survey will throw your name into a pool and you have a one in X chance of winning a larger reward. Now that does increase versus nothing. It does motivate at least some people who wouldn't normally respond in a survey to respond but it's less effective than some of these other incentive techniques that we've had. So, when you're thinking about material incentives, it's important to think about can I actually offer an incentive up front, if I can't how else could I trigger social exchange other than offering an incentive. If I'm offering an incentive after the fact how could I still get that social exchange as opposed to monetary exchange feeling going on between me and the person I'm asking. The important thing about all of these is that benefits have additive reinforcing effects. I wouldn't recommend you follow just one of these strategies to highlight the benefits of your survey, you want to mix and match them. You want to take maybe a monetary incentive or some sort of token of appreciation and match that with highlighting the social good that the survey is doing. All these things can be combined because you basically want to to have the best shot possible with a person's limited amount of attention and people these days of course have very limited attention that they're going to spend on you. How do you hook them into doing your survey? So, all these methods are about how do you entice them through the benefits of the survey and you can mix and match them as much as you need to in order to get past that initial attention barrier that they're going to have. So, a summary of this module one way to increase response rates in your surveys is through highlighting the benefits of participation. It's not just that they're helping you, they're helping other people. They may be helping themselves. You want to trigger social exchange theories to make that happen. There are multiple ways you can highlight those benefits. Material incentives are definitely one way you can provide benefit for participating in a survey, but they can be tricky to get right. Incentives offered before a survey is even conducted are much more effective but often not possible. You have to think about what's the right amount and whether a material incentive will add to or take away from the social exchange that you're trying to create with your respondents. Mixing and matching these benefits makes a lot of sense and you have to think about again in a market of very limited attention, how am I going to break through and help people to realize participating in my survey is actually a good thing to do. It's important that you'd think that. If you don't think that participating in your survey is a good thing for your participant, you shouldn't be asking them to participate. In the next module, we'll be talking about how do we do the flip side of this, how do we reduce costs of participating in surveys.
