Whether your research firm uses surveys to gather consumer insights, pre-election data, or general opinions on a particular topic, you will inevitably ask your respondents where they stand on a pressing issue at some point.
Inquiring where respondents stand on said subjects is essential to your campaigns, but it’s equally important to ask where your fieldwork teams stand … physically.
You read that right—
We aren’t talking about your interviewer’s personal opinions on the topics you are researching. We’re talking about their physical location and why leveraging geographic reporting through your survey questionnaire software is critical to increasing productivity across your organization.
Geo-Fencing Overview
When a firm launches a market research survey campaign and assigns surveyors to one or more designated areas, this is known as “Geo-Fencing.” A properly run Geo-Fenced campaign requires project management teams to identify the coordinates where their interviews are held and determine their relation to the predefined target.
Firms will adjust their geo-fencing based on the characteristics of the planned location. Sometimes, project management teams will require interviewers to conduct surveyors within a set distance from a singular point. An example might be a request to have all surveys regarding an upcoming election take place less than one mile from a local University.
In other campaigns, project managers may request their surveyors to engage respondents within a proximity-defined area. In this instance, managers may ask interviewers to position themselves in a neighborhood within a larger city to gain insights into a specific voting block.
No GPS?
Before we jump into the benefits of enabling geographic reporting for your surveys (of which there are many), we should first take a look at a few of the challenges research firms face when they are provided with inaccurate location data or are missing location data altogether.
No Data Validation
When a firm cannot access location data through its survey data collection software, its project management teams are left with no means to vet the legitimacy of their surveyors’ physical positioning in the field.
Why does this matter?
If your team is going to launch location-targeted projects in hopes of collecting data on specific consumer behaviors, preferences, and cultural nuances, it would be shortsighted to conduct said projects without the ability to validate that the information you are analyzing is coming from the locations you sought to engage.
This assessment also applies to campaigns targeting specific regions based on environmental conditions. Factors such as climate, terrain, architecture, and an individual’s proximity to local resources will vary region by region. These elements can influence purchasing patterns and product/service requirements. Without survey data capture tools that can validate the location of your interview sessions, any errors in surveyor positioning will undermine the targeted efforts of your project management team.
Suspicious Interview Activity
Most of the time, surveys conducted outside of the GeoFenced locations are mistakes on behalf of the fieldwork team members.
Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. At times, firms will encounter surveyors who will attempt to respond to surveys themselves or gather data from other locations to expedite the time it takes to hit their quota or fulfill their responsibilities.
Your latest survey campaign may have returned a vast collection of seemingly high-quality responses. That said, your surveyor might have answered 80% of the questions in their room at home instead of within their designated area. Without geographic reporting, you have no official way to tell if this misreporting occurred.
Missed Opportunities for Enhanced Data Quality and Increased Productivity
Perhaps your fieldwork teams were assigned to three defined locations within a region, and one of the three areas produced high-quality datasets. Respondents in this area were far more willing to engage your surveyors than those in the other two areas, and they also provided much better answers than the other two groups.
In this example, had the projected group enabled live tracking through their geographic reporting suite, they could have instructed surveyors from the other two underperforming locations to migrate to the prospering area to maximize its potential.
With no way to monitor the live performance of these groups, the organization will miss critical opportunities to gather quality survey questionnaire data in a fast and efficient manner.
Not only that—if they failed to capture enough quality data in their initial session, the firm’s project management team may have to allocate additional resources for another round of travel expenses, surveyor compensation, and any fieldwork management fees charged by their CAPI survey provider.
Harnessing the Power of Your Location Data
When your project management teams are equipped with reliable geographic reporting capabilities, they are empowered to:
- Validate Confidently to Enhance Data Quality – Monitor surveyors’ location(s) during interview sessions or after they conclude. Implement different operational approaches during your quality control processes to ensure your fieldwork teams conduct interviews in their assigned locations 100% of the time.
Validating your geo-fenced survey structure can be the difference between extracting quality datasets and receiving entirely unusable responses. Say goodbye to the days of conducting multiple survey sessions in areas that do not meet the criteria of your Geo-fencing protocols, causing operation management and data quality issues. Accelerate your operational efficiency.
- Deter Misreporting – This benefit is made possible by the operational approaches mentioned previously. Adjust your validation methodology to determine what happens when you receive a report of a surveyor’s invalid location.
You may choose to simply notify your surveyor that they are not within the project’s defined target area, or you could opt to disable the surveyor’s ability to conduct any interviews until their location is validated.
- Increase ROI – Investing time, funding, and other resources toward additional survey sessions after an initial attempt can be costly.
Live location tracking can allow for strategic adjustments mid-campaign, and this pertains to much more than merely flagging surveys with invalid locations—your project management teams can instruct surveyors to change locations to increase the overall productivity of your fieldwork team.
Introducing SurveyToGo
A modern survey questionnaire maker cannot merely provide survey creation options. CAPI tools have evolved to the point where this functionality is the bare minimum.
SurveyToGo’s state-of-the-art quality control subsystem was designed to meet the advanced expectations of modern research firms. With comprehensive GPS location tracking and reporting, users can determine where interviews occurred and monitor survey session location data in real-time. With SurveyToGo, your team can receive alerts the moment a surveyor interviews a respondent outside of your preset range and take photo snapshots from your synced devices to gain visual context from your fieldwork teams.
Command the entire quality control process to produce the highest quality datasets from your survey campaigns. In doing so, your organizations would be joining the likes of firms such as Ad’hoc Research and RRC Associates, whose teams both leveraged GPS tracking and reporting to optimize their survey campaigns’ performance.
Ad’hoc Research
There can be value in learning how to do things the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately, when it came to survey research, the old-fashioned method of using paper and pen Face-to-Face interviews was preventing Ad’hoc Research from reaching its expansion goals. To achieve sustainable and scalable growth, the team embraced a modernized approach and implemented SurveyToGo.
The switch proved to be a worthwhile investment. Empowered with a new, flexible solution in SurveyToGo, Ad’hoc Research can now accommodate more clients while simultaneously meeting their unique needs. In particular, the firm’s leadership team noted the important role geo-localization has had on their quality control processes. Now possessing the ability to monitor survey sessions as they happen in real time, the team has continuously enhanced their research quality and expanded their book of business.
RRC Associates
As an industry leader in tourism and recreation consumer intelligence and strategic market research, RRC Associates boasts an impressive portfolio of work—especially when after considering the firm’s lean internal structure. A team of roughly 20 seasoned tourism experts oversees over 100 projects during each calendar season.
While the firm had experimented with electronic surveys after branching out from its original methodology of pen-and-paper in-person interviews, the team needed a solution that could provide live data to accelerate operations and provide key insights into each of their survey campaigns.
After installing SurveyToGo on all of RRC’s devices in the office, the team enabled geographic monitoring and reporting features to improve the deliverables provided to their clients. The geo-tracking was especially useful for the campaigns conducted on mountains within their client’s ski resorts. With SurveyToGo, the RRC team could review the individual locations of the survey engagements on the mountain with ease. The presentation of this data was instrumental in ensuring their fieldwork team members were following appropriate sampling protocols. The firm also found the sophisticated nature of the platform’s reporting dashboard to align perfectly with the expectations of their research team.
Solidifying Your Stance
The significance of location data is often overlooked within a large-scale survey campaign, but the consequences of poor location data are equally underestimated.
Are you tired of your survey location data being a guessing game?
Are you ready to revamp your quality control capabilities and increase your organization’s agility and overall efficiency in the field?
Are you ready to validate survey locations to protect your data quality?
Don’t let poor or missing datasets impact the quality of your surveys or the productivity of your fieldwork teams.
Click here to schedule a demo with a SurveyToGo team member to learn more about SurveyToGo today.