It’s ALL permission based
Everything we do is permission based and entirely opt in.  This needs to be emphasised as traditional research methods rely on interruption and would often be considered SPAM if translated directly online – especially the unpopular telephone survey call in the middle of dinner or the poor old clipboard brigade who have to try to convince busy shoppers to stop in the street for their surveys, whatever the weather.

Pre Recruitment
Prior to recruitment it’s important to establish certain demographic and geographic controls to benchmark the panel against.  The internet does not change as fast as people seem to think but it is a fluid environment and so a panel’s characteristics do need to be regularly monitored to ensure it remains representative of its chosen audience.

Recruitment methods
To try to attract a varied, robust, representative panel it helps to employ a variety of recruitment methods, namely opt in email marketing, public relations activity, online affiliate programmes, member get member schemes, word of mouth and banner advertising.  Affiliate sites have historically been most effective and we have recruitment relationships with hundreds of high traffic sites.

Some competitor panels use offline recruitment as well – we think this is worthy but we do not use it ourselves, because it definitely adds cost (to us and our clients) yet has no discernible impact on the accuracy of results (and we’ve executed a number of studies to investigate this).  As rising internet penetration makes online panels more and more representative of a national population, offline recruitment to online panels is becoming as rare as rocking horse shit (surely hen’s teeth? – Ed).

Post recruitment, Pre Research
Panel applicants are invited to enter brief details on themselves and then sent a confirmation email which they must respond to before they are allowed into the panel.
This also ensures their email is correct.  We try to avoid hotmail and AOL accounts where possible and fight a constant battle to ensure our legitimate email is not unfairly blocked by SPAM filters!
Once the email is confirmed as valid then we invite the user to complete further profiles, however it is at their convenience and is certainly NOT compulsory.