Esomar-28
1. What experience does your company have in providing online samples for market research?
SCR was established in June 2016 and since its inception, has been focussed on providing End to End operational services, delivering complex projects, with hard to reach B2B and Healthcare respondents. We conduct this work by combining online sample from our own proprietary panels and third-party panels, with custom recruitment, carried out by our Executive Interviewing Centre, based in London. We then invite the newly contacted respondents if they are interested in taking part in additional primary research activities, via F2F, telephone or online and if they agree, add them to our network. Until now, we have been successful in building a network covering Corporate C-suite, Financial Services Decision Makers, Healthcare Professionals, and Industry/sector Experts.
We started our operations in June 2016 and until now, have not lost an account we have done business with. Being a new organization, we rely on gaining the faith and building trust with our clients as a provider of high quality data and service standards. We understand that meaningful research can only be conducted if every element of operations is done correctly, first time and continue to strive for excellence, delivering high quality data.
2. Please describe and explain the types of online sample sources from which you get respondents. Are these databases? Actively managed research panels Direct marketing lists? Social networks? Web intercept Samples?
SCR offering consists of providing a mixture of proprietary sample, third party online sample and Custom Recruitment from its Executive Interviewing Centre, which are blended together, with data collected centrally on our platform
Custom Recruitment – SCR pulls contact lists together from a variety of third party sources, including company websites, industry press, DMA list providers and social media and then contacts the respondent directly for bespoke engagements.
Proprietary Sample – All our databases are compiled off the back of the custom recruitment activities and double opted in.
Third party panels – SCR works with carefully vetted partners to provide pre-profiled sample for specific target audiences.
3. If you provide samples from more than one source; How are the different sample sources blended together to ensure validity. How can this be replicated over time to provide reliability? How do you deal with possibility of duplication of respondents across sources?
Third party sample is only ever imported into our projects from carefully selected, certified panels. All respondents need to be pre-profiled as the correct target. All respondents, whether proprietary or third party need to pass through digital fingerprinting technology, which, amongst things, reviews the following:
- IP address
- Geo location
- Email domain whitelist
- Browser Language match
- Time of survey
- Use of proxy
4. Is your sample used solely for market research? If not what other purposes are they used for?
Our sample is solely used for primary data collection for research.
5. How do you source groups that may be hard to find on the internet?
When attempting to supply access to target audiences which are difficult to identify via profiling, SCR custom recruits’ respondents. It does this by building custom lists of targets via desk research and contacting the respondents directly, via email, other digital channels, telephone or face to face.
6. If you need to supplement your sample, on a specified project, with sample from other providers, how do you select those partners? Is it your policy to notify a client in advance when using a third party provider?
SCR offering is based on our expertise at maximising sample, by blending proprietary and third-party access. We are very clear with our clients about how we intend to source the respondents for a specific project and make it clear when we intend to use third party sample.
7. What steps do you take to achieve a representative sample of the target population?
SCR works exclusively in the B2B and Healthcare Professional space, interviewing senior leaders, decision makers, influencers and experts. As such it is common for SCR to contact the entire sample frame available, to deliver a single project, or to only be seeking specific key opinion leaders in their respective field. As such, representative sampling is often a moot point. Any requirements to be representative, need to be controlled via quotas within the survey.
8. Do you employ a survey router?
We do not employ a survey router as this is not suitable for high level B2B and Healthcare Professional sample.
9. If you use a router, please describe the allocation process within your router. How do you consider which surveys might be considered for a respondent? On what priority basis are respondents allocated surveys?
Not applicable
10. If you use a router; What measures do you take to guard against or mitigate any bias arising from employing a router? How do you measure and report any bias?
Not applicable
11. If you use a router: who in your company sets the parameters of the router? Is it a dedicated team or individual project managers?
Not applicable
12. What profiling data is held on respondents? How is it done? How does this differ across sample sources? How is it kept up to date? If no relevant profiling data is held, how are low incidence projects dealt with?
As SCR focusses on B2B and Healthcare Professional respondents, we collect only a few personal details about our members (name, gender, age, education etc) before focussing on their role and responsibilities in their professional life. These are broken out by category, with the option provided for the respondents to provide numerous data points with which we can improve our targeting.
13. Please describe your survey invitation process. What is the proposition that people are offered to take part in individual surveys? What information about the project itself is given in the process? Apart from direct invitations to specific surveys (or to a router), what other means of invitation to surveys are respondents exposed to? You should note that not all invitations to participate take the form of emails
All our invites are direct, to specific respondents, using dynamic personalised links. The invitation will include why they have been selected, what the general (non-leading) topic of the study is provided along with the length of interview, incentives being offered and close date.
14. Please describe the incentives that respondents are offered for taking part in your surveys. How does this differ by sample source, by interview length, by respondent characteristics?
Our most commonly used incentive is to provide direct Honoraria worth a specific value in local currency. Payments are usually made via, bank transfer, PayPal, or Amazon vouchers.
For shorter studies or interviews with corporate professional, direct incentives may not be appropriate. In these instances, charitable donations or knowledge-based incentives are used. Our preferred charity partner is Ecomatcher http://smartconnectresearch.com/giving-back/ , but we also work with other charities on a case by case basis. When knowledge-based incentives are used (reports), the content is supplied by our client.
Certain respondents cannot accept any incentives of any kind, such as government officials and policy makers. They are interviewed without any incentive.
15. What information about a project do you need in order to give an accurate estimate of feasibility using your own resources?
SCR requires the following minimum information from potential clients:
- Survey topic
- Respondent type or job function
- Survey length
- Survey incidence after targeting
- Country/Regions covered
Other requirements may need to be considered if a project has additional specific requirements. These need to be looked at on a case by case basis.
16. Do you measure respondent satisfaction? Is this information made available to clients?
We do not currently measure respondent satisfaction at a project level, but do review response rates and react, this includes online and offline contact
17. What information do you debrief your client after the project has finished?
We treat each of our clients differently according to their reporting requirements on each engagement. SCR believes that ongoing, frequent communication and high-level transparency helps deliver the best results. As a minimum though, we communicate the following:
- Actual Incidence rate
- Actual conversion rate
- Median length of interview
- Daily progress report, if requested.
18. Who is responsible for data quality checks? If it is you, do you do you have procedures in place to reduce or eliminate undesirable in-survey behaviours, such as (a) Random responding, (b) Illogical or inconsistent responding, (c) overuse of item non-response (e.g. “Don’t know”, “Refused”, “Not Applicable”) or (D) speeding (too rapid survey completion)? Please describe these procedures.
At SCR we are committed to delivering the highest quality data possible. We utilise third-party Imperium products (relevant ID and Verity) to validate our panellists and ensure our studies are free of poor quality responders.
In addition, we also review the data at a survey level and look at:
- Racing/speedsters
- Repeat patterns
- Extreme values
- Nonsensical answers
- Answers conflicting with respondents’ database information
- Illogical or poorly filled in open-ends
- Trap questions to assess panel quality
Finally, for our proprietary sample we keep track of our members behaviour during projects to produce a quality index, with suspect panel members removed from survey invites, if their score becomes so low as to be suspect.
19. How often can the same individual be contacted to take part in a survey within a specified period, whether they respond to the contact or not? How does this vary across your sample sources?
As we focus on some very restricted audiences, we place very low restrictions on invite frequency, allowing respondents to be contacted up to once per day. We do however, provide the respondent, with the ability to set their invite frequency or even put in place a moratorium on being contacted.
20. How often can the same individual take part in a survey within a specified period? How does this vary across your sample sources? How do you manage this within categories and/or time periods?
Due to the limited availability of our audience, we place no restrictions on the number of survey our members can take, although, the respondent can restrict it themselves as needed. If clients require resting periods, then this needs to be controlled at a survey level.
21. Do you maintain individual level data, such as recent participation history, date of entry, source etc, on your survey respondents? Are you able to supply your client with a project level analysis on individual level data?
Individual member data is recorded and maintained. This can be made available upon request, provided the request is proportionate.
22. Do you have a confirmation of respondent identity procedure? Do you have procedures to detect fraudulent respondents? Please describe these procedures as they are implemented at sample source registration and/or at the point of entry to a survey or router. If you offer B2B samples, what are the procedures, if any?
All our members are verified by contacting their place of work, either at the recruitment stage for custom work or during post survey verification, if contacted via third party, such as DMA approved list providers. Furthermore, respondent behaviour is tracked with suspicious behaviour flagged.
23. Please describe the Opt-in process for market research’ processes for all your online sample sources
Panel members are required to double opt-in through a registration process at the end of surveys and are then sent a link to confirm their details.
- Respondent is identified via third party source (Company Website, company directories (such as White Pages), industry press or approved list providers
- Respondent is contacted and asked to complete their first survey
- Respondent is asked if they would like to join our panel
- Respondent is sent a link to confirm they want to join
- Respondent is confirmed at their place of business via telephone
Our communication with our members is very simple and transparent. Members are clearly told about our online research offering and are sent survey opportunities after they agree to join.
24. Please provide a link to your privacy policy. How is your privacy policy provided to your respondents?
PRIVACY POLICY
At SCR, respecting privacy is an important part of our commitment to survey respondents and the general public.
When you participate in market research conducted by our organization, you can be confident that any personal information that you share with us will not be passed on to third parties
Any time you participate as a respondent, whether by web, telephone, or in person, you can be assured that any individual responses will be kept confidential and we do not link your personal identifying information to surveys, without your express permission. Your personal identifying information will not be sold to anyone. Participation in individual studies is completely discretionary on a case by case basis and any honoraria or incentives will be clearly stated. Within surveys, you are free to choose not to answer any specific questions and free to discontinue participation at any time.
SCR will continue to review its Privacy Policy to make sure that it is relevant and remains current with changing industry standards, technologies and laws.
SCR is an independent data collection company and is exclusively involved in primary research data collection.
We encourage you to read and understand our Privacy Policy, which can be accessed at Privacy Policy.
25. Please describe the measures you take to ensure data protection and data security.
SCR hosts its data in a secure, third-party data centre in Manchester in the UK and Delft/ Rotterdam in the Netherlands and has security measures in place to prevent unauthorised access to our systems. Panel member PII is protected with survey data only connected to member information, using a machine generated ID.
Participant data is collected and secured using standard industry networking and infrastructure protocols in a tier 1 certified facility which provides full redundancy and monitors all access securely.
Access to panel member PII is limited to employees on an ‘as needed’ basis only, and requires personalised login, with activity tracking in place. All SCR employees are required to adhere to a confidentiality agreement that is signed and stored, when hired.
26. What practice do you follow to decide whether online research should be used to present commercially sensitive data or materials to survey respondents?
As B2B and healthcare data collection experts, SCR is often consulted by clients on the best ways of presenting sensitive information. While no method is 100% secure, we utilise certain technologies and techniques to reduce the chance of copies or screenshots being taken. If information is extremely sensitive, we can also require our members to agree to a confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement prior to receiving the survey or we suggest that the study only be completed at central location.
27. Are you certified to any specific quality system? if so which ones?
We are in full compliance of all recommended industry guidelines and practices and operate in full compliance with any national and provincial laws in the territories in which we collect primary data.
28. Do you conduct online research with children and young people? If so, do you adhere to the standards that ESOMAR provides? What other rules or standards, for example COPPA in the United States, do you comply with?
We do not interview children without exception
