Survey sites guide discussion

mikehobbs

joined populus last night after seeing this thread, and did a survey this morning for £2 got to 100% and then screened out, a lot of these survey sites are just getting enough info they need and screening out its a pain in the !!!!

Kite2010

I've noticed that Toluna has changed the method they say how many points a survey is worth, now it is "upto X Points".

Although I have found a sneaky way to getting a few freebies, if it says "15 to 3000 points", if you click though to the survey and come straight out, you still get 15 points. Takes a bit longer than the polls, but I've only got 400 points to go until I cash out at 60K, and it's goodbye Frenchies

littlewren

Does anyone have problems when trying to cash in their points with either Crowdology or Survation? As they are part of Cint, it must be them I'm having problems with. When I try to redeem the points I just get an error message. The same thing happened last time I tried to redeem, it's so frustrating. :mad:

JDPower

littlewren wrote: »

Does anyone have problems when trying to cash in their points with either Crowdology or Survation? As they are part of Cint, it must be them I'm having problems with. When I try to redeem the points I just get an error message. The same thing happened last time I tried to redeem, it's so frustrating. :mad:

I had a problem a few months ago when requesting a pay out from Crowdology. IIRC I was getting a "Please try again later" type message, emailed them and it was sorted a couple of days later

Kite2010

I've hit 50 points with Populus (currently on 51 points)

Any idea how long it takes for them to send the cheques out (reading the FAQ it seems it's automatic)?

rich_shot2003

Kite2010 wrote: »

I've hit 50 points with Populus (currently on 51 points)

Any idea how long it takes for them to send the cheques out (reading the FAQ it seems it's automatic)?

The last time i got paid it took about 3 weeks.

xnatillyx

Started my survey journey recently and have cashed out on a few. My fave has been opinion outpost. Cashed out £2.50 & £5 in paypal and money has gone in after a couple of days & it was very quick to build up that amount. I am also a member of an exclusive site where i receive £5 every month just for checking in a quickly taking part plus i am awaiting at least £30 for other tasks they are also a fave site of mine.

It seems hit and miss in the survey world. A few sites i do could take months to get to cash out but i don't mind because a good few i know after a few surveys each day after a month i can cash out. I am close on several sites.

I am also waiting for a £15 swagbucks voucher and i am at another £5 already but i am building it up a bit. Love that site with it's mix of things to do. very easy to make £25 a month just hitting the daily targets. cashed out a £10 voucher with Panelbase - i joined those about 2 months back before i really got into surveys and with sporadic surveys a fiver a month is not bad. I am finally waiting for a £5 paypal from My Survey , that should go in soon.

But so far i have had no problems with the sites other than them taking up my time and the odd screening out which is fine for me. to make nearly £50 in 2 months is nothing to be scoffed at and i am having fun doing it. that is without the £35 next points i have also spent the past 2 months.

I am too addicted

System

Well done to you, great post too, very useful I complete about 10-15 survey sites and most weeks I get a payout from one of them, all helps towards the coffers

moxter

Hi folks

An interesting read this thread. I thought I'd give you some (personal) opinions from the other side - I work for a big survey company. Hopefully help you to understand seeing things from our perspective a bit.

It probably helps if I give you a brief overview of the structure of research companies. There are some who are the client-facing researchers, so they'll be speaking with people like Coca-Cola and Nestle to work out their needs, and writing the surveys (and then feeding them the results when they come back). That's the likes of TNS, GfK etc (a few of these companies are quite well known thanks to political polling). Then there are companies who service those client-facing agencies. These "operations" or "fieldwork" companies are the ones who do the grunt-work in the background. One important part of that is providing "sample" - ie people - ie you! There are companies who are specialist "sample providers" or "panel providers". These are the companies who you have the relationships with. Some of these panel providers are very big: for example, Lightspeed/GMI, who are responsible for the MySurvey and GlobalTestMarket panels, are part of Kantar, the research wing of WPP, the largest advertising company in the world, responsible for designing many of the ads you see on your TVs and everywhere else.

Here's an important but uncomfortable truth: panel providers have a commodity. YOU are that commodity. Basically survey companies will approach panel providers when they need a certain number of people to do a survey. There will likely be quotas - so for example they might be looking for female shoppers, but across a distribution of ages and social class. The panel providers look at the number of people on their books (which can be in the millions for big global panels) and basically sell access to you! Generally they know roughly how many of you will bother responding, and how many of you will actually complete the survey, which is all the end client cares about.

All of which is either very interesting or very boring, but gives you a bit of background. Here's another truth: there's a lot of criticism on these pages that "XXXX panel is a scam" etc. There are a handful of scam market research websites out there, but the ones talked about regularly on here are large, well established, respectable companies. They don't have an axe to grind with you personally and certainly aren't going out of their way not to pay you. So be assured that the vast majority of the panels taked about on here are run by big, highly reputable companies who are extremely highly regulated (ESOMAR and MRS industry guidelines, taking into account things like the Data Protection Act and human rights legislation). Which is NOT to say that panel companies don’t make a mess of things – on the contrary, they are riddled with inefficiencies and incompetence in their systems. More of that later.

The next thing you should understand is that the market research industry is (or should be) obsessed with quality, and the quality of a survey is only as good as the quality of it respondents. In other words, the entire industry is completely dependent on you guys! Without you taking the time to fill in surveys, the whole model would collapse. Again, more on that later. But what researchers want is people who are keen to give their opinions thoughtfully and honestly, not just rushing through a survey to collect the reward at the end. What researchers absolutely HATE is what we call “professional respondents” – people sitting behind their computers for hours on end, members of several panels, whizzing through questions as quickly as possible. Sound familiar? If you’re on more than 2 panels and answer more than a survey or two each day then you’re probably what researchers would refer to as a professional respondent. However, there are LOTS of professional respondents and as long as the answers given to the questions are acceptable, then those people will be tolerated – if not actively encouraged!

However, while professional respondents are tolerated, there are (or should be) lots of checks in place with most providers to ensure that your answers are valid. There are all sorts of checks making sure that you answer questions consistently, not too quickly, not just selecting boxes at random, and so on. Those tests are probably more sophisticated and successful at some companies than others! There are “trap” questions, systems to detect “speeders”, and things designed to check that your answers are reasonably consistent. So people do get kicked off panels for not giving “quality” answers, because our clients demand that appropriate quality control is taking place.

One of the problems with the industry, though, is that we’re far too inclined to forget that our existence depends entirely on respondents’ goodwill. There is a HUGE amount of work goes on behind the scenes in making surveys more interesting, easier to complete, and ideally shorter. The difficulty is that all these good intentions are taking a while to implement themselves, and from a respondent’s (your) point of view, the survey-taking experience is generally appalling. We forget, all too often, that you’re giving up half an hour of your time to answer desperately repetitive questions about products that you don’t care too hoots about, in return for 50p. The least we can do is make the experience easier and more enjoyable. We often fail on that front.

Incidentally, wondering why the reward levels are so low? I’m afraid that’s because despite setting the rewards so low, you still turn up and fill the surveys in. Lots of testing is done to see whether changing the reward amount gets better results. If we could get far better response rates with higher incentives, or better quality answers, then we’d pay more. Unfortunately paying more doesn’t get better quality results. So our clients refuse to pay any more. (And if they’d pay less they would, but any lower than the pitiful incentives we currently pay and you wouldn’t bother filling the surveys in).

OK. Ever wondered why you keep getting screened out of surveys or being told that your particular demographic is full? That’s partly because panels are heavily biased towards certain demographics. Low-earning, middle-aged women are heavily over-represented (for example). There aren’t enough affluent people, or young men. Which, incidentally, is just who most of our clients are interested in surveying (because those are the high spenders who are most likely to buy their products!) So, without wanting to sound harsh, consider that you might be in an over-represented group, effectively competing against lots of other people for a few places in the quota! (Which if you’re the sort of person who’s inclined to be fraudulent respondent, should give you a hint on how to set up your profile, although don’t be surprised if the systems eventually catch you out). One area we fall down on really badly is redirecting you to a survey that you ARE likely to be able to complete once you've been screened out. Being screened out is hugely frustrating - you don't need me to tell you how enraging it is to waste 20 minutes of your life being screened out 5 times in a row. Research companies don't do nearly enough do stop this happening, although we do try.

Are there ways of earning lots of money per survey? No, not really. The only people who get paid PROPER amounts are senior decision makers (CEOs, MPs, boards of directors) etc. And there’s good money in qualitative research (focus groups) but recruitment for those works differently, and by its nature there are far less places (typically an online survey will have a “sample size” of 1000, whereas for a piece of qualitative research like a focus group it might only be 10 or so).

But what we forget most of all is how to treat you guys well, who are so critical to the whole industry, even if you are our “commodity”. No, rewards aren’t likely to leap up soon – I wouldn’t personally take half an hour of my time to go round in endless circles answering horrifically dull grid questions about insurance for 50p, but thousands of people would, so the rewards will stay low (kudos to those of you who do put yourselves through it. Your patience is incredible). What we need to be doing MUCH better is making your lives as easy as possible – putting surveys where you want them (mobile? Tablet? App? PC?), making them available offline so you can do them on the tube, making them shorter and less repetitive, not having huge “grid” questions, making the online templates far more attractive. There’s a hell of a lot of work to be done, and the surveys themselves are often riddled with errors and inconsistencies, which rather makes a mockery of our bold claims of scientific rigour. Still, it’s a major industry and will continue.

Perhaps I’ve phrased a few things a little bluntly (and views my own!) but hopefully this will help you see things from “our” point of view. What we, as an industry, need to do more is spend more time seeing things from YOUR point of view. Only by doing that can we make things better both for you and for our own clients who pay our wages.

JDPower

moxter wrote: »

Hi folks.....

That post should be added to the MSE article on survey taking so that every beginner can understand right from the off what most of us learn to be the case through experience. Survey taking for money has, as you say, become a victim of it's own success, thanks mostly to sites like this making such a wide population aware of the money making possibilities. So survey sites have an abundance of respondents and can therefore comfortably offer even less reward for peoples time and it doesn't matter if they lose a few members along the way. Personally I sense a change coming as it seems more and more people are getting disillusioned at the increasingly paltry rewards, though I don't think the rewards will ever get back up to the sort of levels offered 5+ years ago as they can never again be the well kept secret they used to be.