Fieldwork Controls - Scheduling & Pacing
From 26th September 2023, in the UK and the US, you have new fieldwork control options.
These will rollout to other markets in the coming months.
Fieldwork controls
Our platform has been built for speed, which is why your research goes live as soon as your project is confirmed, and will collect the data as quickly as possible. However, we recognize that sometimes this isn’t the best option for your project. Sometimes you are working across timezones, sometimes your surveys need to be scheduled over time in order to ensure it’s representative of your audience, and sometimes consistency is the critical piece. This requires more control over when and how your surveys go into the field. To give you flexibility, we provide scheduling and pacing options at checkout.
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What is scheduling?
Scheduling means you are able to delay the launch of your research project to a later specified time. Example: You can schedule the order for 8 AM local time.
What are the benefits? Why would you want to schedule research?
One of the main benefits is greater convenience. If, for example, you are launching a project in a different country to the one you are in, you don’t need to worry about manually setting it live at a time that’s best for your target audience. You can work during your normal working hours and simply schedule the project to launch automatically at the right time for a representative sample. Or you could choose to create consistency by always launching your surveys at the same time to achieve a representative sample, rather than each one launching at the time you set it up.
By scheduling the time of launch, you can drive consistency and appropriate launch times in all markets.
Why do we recommend launching between 7am and 6pm?
Launching in this time frame has two benefits:
- It provides consistency across all your projects, helping comparability
- It ensures that you capture a varied audience as a wide and representative pool of respondents are available for surveys during this time and into the evening (rather than launching and getting too many completes during the night).
What is pacing?
Pacing refers to the ability to space out the collection of respondents over a set amount of days - 1, 2, or 7 days. Example: You choose to pace the collection of data over 2 days, collecting a set amount of responses at intervals for the duration of that time.
What are the benefits? Why would you want to pace your research?
Pacing your results over time will have a positive impact on the consistency of your results.
The more days you run your research over, the greater the chance of getting responses from the broader segments of your audience. For example, people work different days of the week, or have different activities and time available on different days. Running research for 7 days ensures everyone has a chance to be included in the responses regardless of their routines. 7 days often won’t work for you staying in step with your business needs, but even 2 days would help versus 1 day, and 1 day would help versus a few hours.
Pacing is particularly beneficial when you are researching multiple ideas (stimuli) together and looking to choose and optimize the better ones. By using the pacing functionality, your research will finish at the same time for all ideas and consistency will help make very direct comparisons with greater confidence.
Setting up scheduling & pacing
Current availability: US & UK markets
To use scheduling or pacing, you will need to select the options from the "Launch Options" menu on the Checkout page of your project configuration - this is the last page before you click "Pay now and launch." You may need to scroll down to see the "Launch Options" menu.
You will see it defaults to launching immediately and collecting without pacing.
Click "Change" and a menu will appear that looks like this:
Scheduling
Under "Launch Time," you will be prompted to specify the start time of your survey in the given timezone. Recommendations will be made for you, or you can set it to a custom time.
Pacing
Under "Respondents Pacing," you will be prompted to specify from preset options the time period over which you’d like to collect data.
Other questions
Is my data poor quality if I don’t use Fieldwork Controls?
Not at all. There is a lot that we do to ensure that our data is of the highest quality, whether or not you make use of our fieldwork controls.
It is always going to be a case of balancing the need for speed with the need for ‘perfection’. For the biggest business decisions, we recommend building in enough time to collect fieldwork over as many hours/days as possible (ideally 24 hours as a minimum).
Survey scores are influenced by many different things, including the timing of data collection. Across all projects, when we look at and compare to norms this balances out well. What this means is that benchmarking against a norm is still stable.
If however you are looking to make your business decision by simply comparing across your set of ideas and choosing the best, consistency in how you collect the data becomes more critical. In these cases we would advise building in more of these fieldwork controls to match across the ideas.
In almost all cases we also have many diagnostics to inform the decision and check the right decisions can be made in confidence.
Some examples:
- If you are looking to launch a survey at 11pm, we would advise to wait and launch the next morning at 7am and let the research run ideally for 24 hours or at least 12 (for most brands)
- If you are comparing between ideas within one project, we would recommend they have the same fieldwork controls