Fieldwork Controls - Scheduling & Pacing
Fieldwork control options are currently available in the US and the UK.
Fieldwork controls
Zappi recognises the need for speed; that’s why most research goes live immediately and the data is collected as quickly as possible. However, we recognize that sometimes speed isn’t always the top priority. You may want to schedule your project for a later date, or to slow down the fieldwork over a period of time to ensure it’s representative of your audience. With our scheduling and pacing options at checkout, you have full control over when and how your surveys go into the field.
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What is scheduling?
Scheduling enables you to delay the launch of your project to a later specified time. Example: you can schedule the order for 8 AM local time.
What are the benefits of scheduling research?
One benefit is greater convenience. For example, if you are launching a project in a different country, 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 hours and schedule the project to launch 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 slows down a project to a target completion-window. An 18-24-hour paced project will be spread across a minimum of 18-24 hours, but may take longer. You can choose different target windows (approximately 1, 2, or 7 days). Example: You choose to pace the collection of data over the 42-48 hour window (2 days). This will make sure that your fieldwork takes at least 42 hours, making sure you get a balanced representative sample.
What are the benefits of pacing your research?
Pacing can improve 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 have work, activities, or availability on different days of the week. Running research over 7 days ensures everyone has a chance to respond regardless of their routines. We know that you won’t always have 7 days, so you can choose shorter pacing windows if they work better for you.
Pacing is particularly beneficial when you are researching multiple ideas simultaneously enabling you to run research over the same time period. This helps you make direct comparisons with greater confidence.
Setting up scheduling & pacing
Current availability: US & UK markets
Select scheduling or pacing 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 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