| > what is your balance of private and university clients as of today? Our clients are about 80-90% academic, and we find that there’s a strong move within academia towards fair payments. In the long term we think that this will show in the data quality and reliability of samples such that paying fairly will result in the best value. Regarding cost, we're about $2 total for a 15min survey right now. > How large is your pool? Lack of transparency about pool size is one of the most frustrating things about online panels. This is one of the reasons why we don’t report our total pool size, but only our ‘active and accessible’ pool (participants who have been active within the past 90days). As a result, you can expect > 50% of the numbers of eligible participants we report to actually take part in the next 24/48hours. We have ~70,000 active participants (20,000+ in the US). I expect we would be able to get a sample of 5,000 people in <48hours, but would only be about to repeat this for about 10weeks with unique participants. Our ‘pool’, as measured by traditional panel providers is approaching 500,000, but we don’t think this is a useful metric as the majority no longer respond to invites. > a) how you recruit high income people into your pool; To be honest, we haven’t cracked this nut yet and we expect our pool to be unrepresentative for high income people also right now. Ideas we have to help address this problem are to 1) introduce charitable donations for those who aren’t motivated by cash incentives 2) improve non-financial incentives (e.g. feedback on the impact your data is having) and 3) have highly targeted invites, we hypothesize high earners would be willing to help out if we need someone of their demographics in particular, and if this was communicated well. If you have suggestions, we’re all ears! > and b) what percentage of your pool would be high income (say HHI > $125k a year or so). According to self report we have ~2,000 participants from a HHI (>$100k/year on our screener), though it’s possible this suffers from slight inflation and we don’t (yet) have a way to verify income levels. > Finally, what is your pool attrition rate? Our annual retention rate is ~40% or so (e.g. if a participant takes part in a study, they’re about ~40% likely to do so again 12months later). There’s a balance between ‘refreshing’ our pool and keeping high engagement, and we’re working on keeping “naivety” high while allowing for studies over a long period! |
I have had some involvement in running charity events that target high net worth people. You attract them via their ego. Put their name on everything, use their name frequently when speaking with them.
And the kicker - never actually ask them to donate or take the survey or whatever. Just describe what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. They already know you’re talking to them because you want something from them, but if you ask them directly, they’re trained to say no because they have to do it all day. You need to let them make the decision to participate on their own.