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Protip: How to Recover From a Low Response Rate

By crooky | February 20, 2008

There are few things as demoralizing to a professional researcher than spending your time getting a survey together, cleaning up your distribution list and offering a prize in a random draw only to have a response rate in the single digit range.

The number one reason for this happening is a survey that targets the wrong group of people. I just had this happen to me on a survey and I think the main problem is that we were targeting senior executives, asking for information that could be considered commercially sensitive. It’s not that you can’t get that information from these kinds of people, you’re just better to do it in an interview format.

So, the attempted survey fails - what next? The best thing to do is to find other audiences for the survey and/or find another way to hey the information from these parties. Interviews can be a costly and time-consuming alternative but in some cases, it’s the only way to go.

The key thing to remember as part of your recovery strategy is to manage your client’s expectations. If you told them that you were going to produce a statistically accurate report and you have to switch to a qualitative study to save the project, make sure the client understands the implications of this.

Qualitative studies can be just as good as statistically accurate studies, they’re just different and require interpretation of anecdote over analysis of facts.

The toughest part for me is figuring out what to do about prizing when the sample size is in the single digit range. I’m open to suggestions.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Research Methodologies |

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