Jacqueline Rosales, SoapBox COO, to Emcee SampleCon 2016

Newly Independent SampleCon Appoints Master of Ceremonies for its Flagship Event

January 6, 2016 — The SampleCon Board of Directors officially announced their choice to preside over SampleCon 2016. Jacqueline Rosales, COO of SoapBoxSample and SampleCon Founding Member, will emcee the sample conference coming up later this month. In this role, Jacqueline Rosales will help to foster a collaborative environment for frank discussions about the future of the sample industry in addition to announcing the events, and overseeing the flow of the agenda.

By taking an active role in the re-definition of SampleCon as an independent company, SoapBoxSample aims to positively influence the sample industry for years to come.

Jacqueline Rosales commented, “I’m honored to be playing such a key role in SampleCon 2016. This is a crucial moment for the sample industry. By creating an engaging sample conference now, we can continue to build a community of involved members.”

The only Market Research industry conference focused solely on sampling evolved in 2015 into a non-profit organization run by an independent Board of Directors. As part of the organization’s revamp, Jacqueline Rosales was appointed to an annual term as Treasurer of SampleCon.

SampleCon 2016 will take place January 25-27 at the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans. Exploring progress in sampling will be the focus of the discussions. Over the past year, the Board of Directors and the newly appointed 2016 Conference Board, have partnered with industry bodies to further drive the establishment of common protocols and definitions, explored at the 2015 conference.

About SampleCon

SampleCon was launched in 2013 by Lucid [formerly Federated Sample] with the goal of creating an open forum for discussion of topics in the sample industry. In 2014, Jacqueline Rosales, SoapBoxSample; Bonnie Breslauer, Lightspeed; and Mendy Orimland, Prodege joined Patrick Comer and Andy Ellis of Lucid and Fulcrum joined SampleCon as Founding Members. This transition further solidified SampleCon as the industry changing conference focused on survey sampling. Since its inception, SampleCon has experienced exponential growth and the unique ability to attract industry players from organizations across all facets of the sample space.

To learn more about SampleCon and register, visit www.samplecon.com.

Advanced Logic

Welcome to the new world of easy and automated Advanced Logic. There are a ton of unique use cases, ground breaking technology and applications clients are coming up with every day that we never thought of. So really, feel free to give us a call and ask us questions on this – we are here to help.

As a quick summary here are some of the key features and ways to use our new Advanced Logic:

  • It is simply a WHO, WHEN and WHAT process:
    • Determine WHO you want to apply a rule to – this is where you can set compound logic, set rules (selected at least 3, total = X, etc.), pull from previous segments or tags and more.
    • Tell the platform WHEN you want to trigger this action. That means you can set quotas and have separate actions before and after a quota is hit, trigger the action on a page, after a page group, upon survey completion, termination and so forth.
    • Tell the platform WHAT you want to happen. This is where it gets super cool! You can tag a group, show/hide/skip logic, redirect to custom links outside the platform, invite to a follow-up activity, hide data, pay incentives and more.
  • No complicated coding, but natural language instructions – easily set your rules and logic with common sense rules.
  • Create on-the-fly “segments” and then re-use those segments anywhere in the survey for easy compound rules and logic.
  • Create rules and logic from ANY other data source in the platform! Want to only show page 3 of the Brand Survey to those that said they were “female” in their profile AND who chose product X in the Product Survey last year? – no problem.
  • Choose from multiple pre-coded options including “any of”, “none of”, “select at least X of Y”, “sum is” and many more.
  • Custom quota creation – allowing you to trigger any activity or action based upon quota triggers.
  • See a beautiful visual summary of all your coding logic, right there in-line on the page and even test your logic and see who falls into which segments, pages and activity flow.
  • And, tons more.

Here are a few example screen shots.

Insight Communities – To Incentivize or Not To Incentivize

We get a lot of questions about whether or not to provide incentives when it comes to online insight communities. And the answer is? Drumroll please…well, it depends.

Our typical advice is we don’t like “pay-to-play” – it provides the wrong incentive structure and invites the wrong people and activities. However, research should not be about trying to suck as much data from respondents as quickly and cheaply as possible either – you get what you pay for! But, “pay” can come in many forms. It can be cold hard cash, interacting with fellow community members with similar interests, seeing your feedback and ideas come to life and simply knowing that your feedback is being heard.

Our recommendation is to build a community based around altruistic reasons to join and participate – “Hey, help us make the products and services you personally use better – really we are listening!” And, then from there be fair with people’s time – pay them as you would anyone else providing a valuable service when asking for significant chunks of time.

Below are a few factors to consider when determining if it makes sense to incorporate monetary incentives in your online research activity:

  • Activity length/time commitment – When you ask a participant to complete a longer activity, an incentive will help sustain their participation and ensure reliable and better-quality responses. If a participant can provide feedback very quickly or easily, an incentive may not be necessary.
  • Your audience – Is this is a case where participants are already intrinsically motivated to join the conversation? For example, your customers or employees may be more intrinsically motivated to respond to a survey than just your average Joe. The same is true for communities where members have a very strong affiliation with the brand/product/subject matter and will participate out of love for a product, brand or having the ability to interact and learn from their peers.
  • Activity type – What are participants going to do? If you are asking complex questions or questions that require a lot of thought, an incentive can help boost participation and it’s only fair to compensate someone for significant time or effort.
  • The alternatives – Monetized incentives shouldn’t be the only weapon in your arsenal. In a perfect world, you’d want engagement to be the main driver of participation. Consider using intangibles to add value to your community (e.g., Look what we’ve done with your feedback, etc.). It is important that participants are being listened to and feel they are making a difference. Be sure to let the community know they are heard– rewards are just the cherry on top of the insight pie!

How much? How much? How much? As with a traditional focus group, the incentive amount will vary with the type of participant and how much you are asking them to do. We have found that incentives (ranging from $5 to $25) given at regular intervals to each member who qualifies and successfully completes an activity. This normally amounts to about $1/minute.

We hope you have found this helpful – let us know your thoughts and ways you have found to be successful when it comes to incentivizing an insight community (both monetary and non). No incentive will be provided for your feedback to this blog post.

Updated Live Chat – Now with Quant

We knew as soon as we released our sweet, easy live chat module this would happen…someone would ask – “Can I put survey questions in there?” The answer is YES! So, is it a chat with survey questions or is it a survey with live chat to probe on the survey responses? The answer is both.

  • Easily ask survey questions as part of your Live Chat session
  • See the data roll in with real-time charting and respondent level data
  • Easily probe and chat around the question, even share results with respondents so they can discuss them as a group
  • Mix and match chat questions and survey questions
  • Include video, images and documents as part of any question
  • Contact us for a live demo to see just how easy it is.

How Mobile Surveys Fail

Most Surveys Don’t Take Full Advantage of Capabilities

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Fresh Findings From SoapBoxSample and Distill Research

— In the increasingly pervasive world of smartphones, market researchers are seeking ways to leverage the small-screen platform for speed, convenience and unique data collection capabilities (e.g. photos/scanning). A recent survey of smartphone owners conducted by Distill Research with respondents provided by SoapBoxSample revealed that mobile surveys are only a small part of the research landscape and that most of these surveys fail to take advantage of smartphone capabilities.

Researchers that want to engage respondents on a smartphone may find success; about half of smartphone owners that were asked to switch from a desktop to their phone to take a survey did so.

In terms of comfort with information sharing, tracking and sharing web history or allowing an app to access personal contacts were deemed to be more off limits. Conversely, there is a notably high number of smartphone owners willing to share personal health information. Demographically, younger males appear to be more willing to share data or download apps that will streamline or personalize their survey experience. In general, older respondents are less willing to share any form of personal data.

These and many other important findings on feelings towards mobile surveys are available for free at www.distillresearch.com/mobilesentiment.

A Note About Methodology
This survey was conducted online within the United States by Distill Research from September 9, 2014 to September 15, 2014 among 537 U.S. adults ages 18 to 65, who own a smartphone and participated in at least 1 online survey in the past 3 months. While the sample was collected to mirror the age, gender and regional proportions of the U.S. smartphone-owning population according to Pew Research, this online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

About Distill Research
Distill Research is an independent custom market research company founded by three highly skilled and experienced market researchers with more than 50 years of combined experience. Distill provides primary quantitative and qualitative market research for a diverse group of companies in technology, telecom, financial services, advertising & marketing, entertainment & media, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, public policy, consumer package goods, travel & leisure, quick service restaurants, and energy. The company is based in Portland, Oregon. For more: www.distillresearch.com.