Reaching your Target with Panels (webinar)

Christian: Hi everyone, and welcome to this webinar about reaching your target audience using online panels and web survey software. My name is Christian Vanek - I’m the co-founder and CEO of SurveyGizmo.

With me today is Terence McCarron from Cint - Terence, why don’t you say “Hi?”

Terence: Hi. I serve in the capacity of Senior Vice President of North American Sales here at Cint.

Christian: Excellent. Today we’re going to be talking about using the integration between Cint and SurveyGizmo, as well as how to reach optimum audiences online using panels.

So quickly looking at our agenda, we’re going to have some basic introductions - both Terence and I will talk about our companies. Terence will then talk about how you have access to Cint’s worldwide panels and what that means for you. We’ll do a quick demo of the SurveyGizmo survey tool, showing the Cint panel integration, and then there’ll be some time for questions and answers. So, without further ado, let’s get started. I’ll talk about SurveyGizmo a little.

SurveyGizmo is an online survey tool. We started in 2006. We’re used by many of the Fortune 500 companies and thousands of smaller businesses across the world in order to create online surveys, questions, web forms and quizzes. We’re known for having advanced features and functionality available at a very economic price. We’re also fully multilingual and multinational. You can use SurveyGizmo to survey respondents in any country in any language. We don’t do the translations ourselves, but our software supports any UTF-8 language.

Terence, do you want to take over for a sec?

Terence: I’d love to, thanks, Christian. Also, thanks for including Cint here today - we’re really excited about partnership that we’ve created with SurveyGizmo.

By way of background, Cint has been around since 1999 and we are a technology firm that offers sort of a new way to access online samples, but also creates a very cost-effective and speedy approach to long-arm research. We take a very transparent and quality-driven approach to our technology and the things that we do. And one important note that I’ll just is mention is that we’ve created a very automated access point to our nine market research panels across the world who are in technology and we don’t actually own any of the panels, which enables us to have a quality approach to sampling across 550 panels in 42 countries.

Next slide, please. In the picture here you see our partnership with SurveyGizmo, which we’ve been fortunate to be able to work with a highly-skilled development team over on the SurveyGizmo side, to create a real automated approach to accessing the market research samples you’ll see in a minute through the SurveyGizmo interface. In this process for which we’re going to enlist SurveyGizmo, we still have the ability to offer extremely targeted market research samples, using the same data and quality standards our customers are used to.

In the online market research space, there’s quite a bit of conversation around quality and making sure that the data that comes on the back end is extremely reliable based on the industry-wide standards. Cint adheres, even raises the bar on these standards and I want to give a little bit of a highlight of what that looks like in the panel exchange environment. So, first of all, we do comply with the industry association standards for ESOMAR, MRS, CASRO, MRA, ARF, and others, as well.

And some other highlights that I think really drive home the trust that our clients have in this data that’s generated from the market research samples we provide are things like our panelist rating scoring system, which moderates the activity level from the respondent. A random and stratified sample approach, which we can certainly touch on a little bit later.

We also offer things like quarantine settings, which ensure that all panels that are involved in Cint’s technology are not over-invited to online surveys available through any clients of ours. We have automatic exclusions for things like category or other project participation. We have full duplication capabilities through some of the most advanced technology across all the panels in the system.

We also take other measures to ensure that the online surveys that our respondents are seeing are of the highest quality in our partnership at SurveyGizmo, and we also, as I mentioned earlier, do a very good job at preventing professional respondents participating in the survey wherever possible.

Well, that’s a little bit of a highlight of the quality program that’s all built into this automated process and technology at Cint.

Christian: Thanks, Terence. Yeah, before we proceed, can I ask a quick question, if I were a market researcher and looking for panelists, can you talk about some of the strengths of the Cint panels - are they primarily B2B, are they B2C? What are some of the indicators that would make Cint the right choice for my population?

Terence: Sure, absolutely. The Cint panel exchange includes roughly five-and-a-half million active panelists worldwide. It does skew heavily in the B2C space. So very robust profile capabilities in the consumer sample arena for sure. So that’s one indicator that is likely to help you.

In terms of our approach, I think in the marketplace - in particular in United States and spanning throughout Europe now - it has become very common for market research panel companies to blend their own assets with other outside resources, as well. So, in another words, partner panels. What’s lacking right now is any sort of consistent controls or transparency. So our clients really kind of take advantage of the fact that we are a very transparent option. The controls that we have on the quality side to the way we plan and the way we sample are consistent across all the market research panels. And we also very commonly report on things like real active panel channels and response rate, so we’re able to equally adapt and adjust to make sure that things are completed on time. So those are just a couple of ways that we have to show that we are a very modern option for the things that are going on today.

Christian: Excellent, that’s fantastic, thanks.

Okay, so I’ll take over and so what we’ll do now is we’ll leap into SurveyGizmo and we’ll take a look at the Cint market research panel integration with SurveyGizmo. We’ll actually walk through the quick creation of an online survey and the ordering of a Cint panel to answer the survey and we’ll talk a little bit more about that. Let me pop over to SurveyGizmo.

So, I’ll just create a test online survey for this and so that we don’t have to spend some time creating survey questions, I’m just going to use a default survey template here.

So now that I have the online survey created in SurveyGizmo and I’m ready to publish it, I’ve gone through the entire design process, I will click on the Publish tab and this is where I’m going to access the Cint integration.

Now, typically, what I would have had to do for a normal market research panel company is to go into my online survey, create redirections back to the links that my panel company gave to me in order to track completes and disqualifies and things of that nature. The really nice thing about the integration with Cint and SurveyGizmo is to order a Cint panel, it’s as simple as clicking on the panel icon down here under campaigns, choosing the Cint integration and the Cint ordering form will actually appear right inside SurveyGizmo.

And you’ll see this is the online survey link that is automatically given over to the panel company and this is just typically what you would do if you were working externally with Cint or with another panel company and they would give you backlinks. The nice thing about this is, Cint has taken care of all of this. This survey will automatically redirect to Cint at the end of the survey - that fulfillment aspect is taken care of.

So, that’s one great reason to actually use this integration. Another is right here: you can see that the total number of survey questions in my online survey has already been sent. Cint has a concept of this survey already. And as I change the options within the Cint integration panel, you see that my price will change and update based on each one of these options.

So I’ll know exactly what I’m getting, exactly what I’m paying for and it’s as simple as just clicking. I’ll put that I want 200 respondents, I am going to go to advanced options and this is where you can now tailor the panel respondents to your needs. So for a pricing study, I really don’t care if somebody’s male or female. I will look for this particular age group and then in terms of education status, I’m going to go to “full-time employee.”

So, what’s interesting is, you’ll see that as I’ve made these changes, the price is automatically updated and this is something that typically you’d go through a lot of back and forth with your project manager with the panel company. This is just a nice, easy, convenient way to have it taken care of all at once.

When we’re ready to actually submit, we’ll go to the Overview tab. We’ll look at the total order that we’re placing through and then click on the Buy link, and we can check out and purchase the panel right here. The Cint project managers will then take a look at your survey, make sure everything is okay, make sure that there are no particular problems, just like a normal project manager would do, and then they will activate the market research panel for you and you’ll start seeing respondents come in.

So I’m going to close this down and go back and show you how this will actually play out within your account. As new panelists come in for this particular market research panel, the number of completes will simply start incrementing.

If I didn’t get the total number of completes after I’m analyzing my data that I needed in order to make good statistical analysis, I could activate another panel…do another smaller order for the same type of individual. These are the types of things that this SurveyGizmo integration with Cint allows. You could be up late at night doing this and it would allow your market research panel order to still go through even if your project manager is not awake and checking their email.

So it’s a very convenient integration like that and very simple, as you saw - there’s actually not much else to say. It is that quick.

So, at this point, Terence, do you want to add anything to this process, talk about any more of the options?

Terence: What I’d like to just mention overall is, I just wanted to reiterate the strength of SurveyGizmo survey tool, solution set and its UTF-8 support. The fact that it’s able to handle most of the languages actually integrating very well with Cint. So what enables the user here is access really across all 42 countries and the respondents that we have available. And again, there are some quality checks in place that we assist with, so just double-check translations and things like that to ensure the highest quality data sets. Even still, it’s a really nice complement to the robust nature of the multilingual capability within SurveyGizmo, combined with the panel access and global market research reach of the Cint environment. So I would just highlight that a little bit.

But overall, I think it’s important to just note here that this kind of integration is global panel integration with such an easy-to-use, yet robust and powerful survey tool, is kind of new to the industry. There aren’t many like this available now, so I think that gives a little more color to the excitement that we have at Cint to be able to partner with SurveyGizmo.

Christian: Well, thank you.

Questions & Answers

And I see that now’s the time when we’d be answering some questions. We actually have a couple queued up, so I think this is, the first question here, Terence, I think is for you:

Given the scenario in the survey that we were just looking at, what would be the worldwide turnaround for the survey? How many days? How would Cint manage that type of question?

Terence: Typically, it’s just a matter of a couple of days and I think within the integration itself, as you’re pricing it out it will give estimates for days involved to complete. But usually, it’s no more than a couple of days.

Christian: Excellent.

Terence: Also, I should mention, that’s based on how many completed interviews you hope to achieve as well.

Christian: And how are the panelists incentivized?

Terence: That’s a really good question and it’s part of our technology. What we’re able to do is have an incentive model that ties back to the vicinity of the individual market research panel only.

So it really comes down to one of two ways. One is typically a cash incentive, which for a shorter survey would be something like fifty cents. Other approaches, which is really the second approach using our panel exchange, is really a points model - so it’s more of accumulating kind of like frequent flyer miles points on an ongoing basis against a larger, sort of either rewards a cash payout after a certain amount is accumulated. So in the Cint panel exchange, it’s either cash or points and that’s how all respondents that come into an online survey through SurveyGizmo would absolutely be incentivized. The thing I will note is Cint does not employ things like sweepstakes with the panels in our environment.

Christian: Okay, and so just for those people online that are not familiar with panel organizations, you handle all of the incentives and the tracking of that type of thing. That’s not something that they would be doing inside the survey, correct?

Terence: That is absolutely correct. It’s all part of the offering.

Christian: Perfect. So, another question:

How do you ensure the same person doesn’t come to my survey twice?

Terence: That’s actually a really good question. It goes to the heart of sort of the blending trend that’s going on in the industry right now. And it’s actually pretty simple, but also wrapped up with a lot of advanced technology.

On a basic level, every time a panelist comes into the exchange, we have the personal information of that respondent from the panel owner, so we are able to actually use these to validate personal information - to compare that and verify it against the rest of the panels that are in the exchange. And if a duplicate is identified on the psychology level, then we just assign one ID, which ensures that when sampling occurs, that person is not allowed in to the same survey or any survey on any given day more than once.

That being said, there’s also a backup plan that we have just to make sure it’s extra rigid and on our project level, we have all the advanced digital fingerprinting capabilities that you would possibly need or want to do things like machine level tracking, capturing and IP validation as a backup to make sure the same person does not come into the same survey.

Christian: Excellent. And I would also put in there Cint is very good at doing this, this is their core business. And you can also use SurveyGizmo’s post-survey de-duping just to ensure that everyone is coming from a unique sources, so a lot of SurveyGizmo’s functionality that you’d use with your own customer base can still be used with Cint.

So we have another question:

How hard is it to reach specific audiences like “Moms in Barcelona” or “Moms in Moscow?”

Terence: There’s a whole layer of profiling information that is available from Cint to the panel exchange and we’ve made a few of the demographic targets available right through the integrated interface here. That is actually not hard at all for us to dig more deeply into profile areas or even non-standard region selection, so we have robust capability in that, as well.

Christian: Okay. Another question:

What is the time frame for when you’d expect to get all of the responses?

So, can you talk about that a little bit? Let’s say that I ordered 800.

Terence: Really required, and based on the market, too, but typically, most of our studies are all complete within a matter of just a couple of days. You can see here with so much automated in the integration, the actual launching of the study is a very, very short-order process. And then as far as completing all the entire market research process, it really comes back to how many interviews you need, but generally, I would imagine most of the studies would be complete in a matter of a couple days.

Christian: Okay.

How are the panelists recruited?

Terence: The panels are recruited actually a variety of different ways, that’s actually another really good question. It comes back to a couple of philosophies. One, is really an online, double opt-in recruitment strategy, which is extremely common, used for most panel studies worldwide. And that is also representing most of the panels that are in our system, so that’s using some targeted, if you would Google “survey,” “survey panels,” things like that, that would get you to auto-recruitment sites and campaigns that typically constitute many of the panels we exchange with outside the way our exchange operates.

We do have other panels that have other means of recruitment, as well. For instance, we have one panel that uses telephones and we would only be using a telephone sample to recruit panelists that way for a national representation. That is common - there’s a couple like that in the US, and outside the US, there’s a few like that, as well.

So I guess a longer answer to a short question, but most of the recruitment is done the typical way, which is online marketing, online advertising approaches, while others are recruited through the telephone and other more traditional methods.

Christian: Excellent. Another good question in here:

Do specific audiences influence the cost or the time frame of the panel?

Terence: Depends on the ranges, one in particular: the younger the age range, the slower the responsiveness that you typically get, so that absolutely could come into play.

We have something for kids, I would say, that in combination with how many you actually use would determine whether it would take more than three or four days. So, yeah, that absolutely affects the time.

Christian: Okay, and this will be our last question and if we haven’t gotten to your question, we will email you back with the response to the question. But, this is about the demographic information for each respondent:

Does respondent demographic information get pushed back into SurveyGizmo for reporting or analysis? Or will the online survey builder have to ask those questions again in order to collect that information?

And I can take a stab at this, and Terence, why don’t you tell me if I’m right:

The current integration, I believe does not provide the demographic information for the respondent. Is that correct?

Terence: That’s right.

Christian: Okay, so hopefully that was clear.

We will be putting the recording of this webinar up onto our website, and we’ll be shooting you an email to let you know when it is up. Terence, thank you so much for joining us today. And thanks to everyone else for joining, as well. Thanks so much.

Terence: Thank you.