In February this year, partners in the Participant Engagement Initiative met and confirmed their intention to make this an action- and results-based initiative by setting ambitious goals for the program.
AMBITIOUS GOALS SET
The partners set the following goals for this year:
  1. To start collecting and disseminating UX metrics in March
  2. To create and disseminate a Best Practice Handbook in October
UX Metrics
Through their ability to demonstrate the impact of a good (and bad) experience, solid metrics are the key to changing behaviour and improving the participant experience. We are focusing on two key metrics:
  1. The rating the participant gives to the experience of participating in a research project
  2. The impact participating in a research project has on the participant’s perception of the brand/company behind the research
The metrics will be used for two purposes:
  1. To provide examples for the best (and worst) practice handbook
  2. To enable partners to gain a better understanding of what is driving a great (or bad) experience and to use this knowledge to change their behaviour and the behaviour of their clients
In particular, we believe that the fact that partners will be able to engage their clients on how to create a positive, and avoid a negative, brand equity / corporate reputation impact, will enable a constructive dialogue around participant engagement between all stakeholders.
Best (and worst case) handbook
The objective is to provide agency-side researchers, as well as client-side researchers and users of research, with a practical handbook containing examples of best (and poor) practices relating to the research participant experience. The examples will be based on existing research-on-research conducted by GRBN and our partners, on the metrics data partners are collecting, and on new research-on-research projects we are undertaking.
Great workgroups in place
One way partners are showing their commitment to the initiative is by signing up to the different workgroups, which have responsibility for achieving the goals. We are deliberately keeping the data collector/research agency/client workgroups separate to start with, so that each may focus on what they specifically can do to improve participant engagement. As we advance, we will cross-pollinate the workgroups and focus on how changing the ways of working together can further improve the user experience. We are very pleased to have Peter Milla on-board, representing the Insights Association’s Online Sample Forum, which will ensure there is maximum synergy between the two initiatives. To start with, the following three workgroups have been set up:
  1. Data collector partners’ research specialists
    1. Online quantitative research
      1. Armen Adjemian, Active Measure
      2. Jeff McKenna, Critical Mix
      3. Adriana Rocha, EC Global Solutions
      4. Lisa Wilding-Brown, Innovate
      5. Bruno Paro, Netquest
      6. Peter Milla, Online Sample Forum
      7. Janna de Bruijne, P2Sample
      8. Michael McCrary, Pure Spectrum
      9. Roddy Knowles, Research Now
      10. Jackie Lorch, SSI
    2. Online qualitative research and online communities
      1. Adriana Rocha, eCGlobal Solutions
      2. Katrina Noelle, KNow Research
      3. Nikki Lavoie, MindSpark Research International
      4. Kerry Hecht, Recollective
      5. Catherine Rogers, Vision Critical
      6. Jade Lindroth, Vision Critical
      7. Gemma Proctor, Vision Critical
      8. Christy Ransom, Vision Critical
  2. Research agencies’ research specialists
    1. John Crockett, Environics Research
    2. Zoe Dowling, FocusVision
    3. Richard Goosey, Kantar Health
    4. Bob Graff, MarketVision
    5. Catherine Rickwood, Mesh Experience
    6. David Rothstein, RTI Research
    7. Cyrus McCandless, Sentient Decision Science
As we move forward we will be putting an end-client workgroup together, as well as a marcoms workgroup to ensure that we get our messages across as effectively as possible.
Welcome on-board
Fuel Cycle is the latest company to join the initiative, taking the total number of companies currently on-board to 24… PEI   No matter whether you are a data collector, a research agency or an end-client, we want to partner with you. There are many options to get involved and we hope as many companies as possible will partner with us on deploying the metrics, so that we may achieve a maximum amount of change in a short as possible time-frame. Now is the time for us all to take action to drive up participation rates by improving participant engagement and the user experience, so please join us on this mission! To get involved, please drop us a line. You can find out more about the partner opportunities here.

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