FAQs

This is flexible, and the number of questions is usually based on the type of survey. Custom research projects are allowed a different number of questions to a PR survey, and will be advised by our researchers. PR surveys that are conducted as part of earned media campaigns typically have about 20 questions, written with the help of our team of journalists, and five additional questions chosen by the client.

We have a team of experienced researchers and journalists who know how to phrase questions to keep them compliant with market research standards while still ensuring the strongest data points. We’re happy to offer advice and suggestions while you’re drafting your survey, or we can draft the entire survey and share it with you for edits and feedback — it’s as collaborative a process as you’d like to make it.

Yes, we can embed a video within the survey for respondents to watch — we’re also able to incorporate images, audio files, maps, etc. as part of our surveys.

We are able to apply routing to any survey to ensure people only answer questions relevant to them. An example of this would be if a respondent said they don’t have children; from there, they’ll be routed away from any questions about having children later on in the survey. There are different kinds of routing, too — we can also make this more complex, to hide certain answer options, etc. depending on the needs of the survey.

Absolutely! We won’t set the survey live until you’re 100% happy with the content of the questions. Our researchers will also make final checks to ensure the questionnaire is compliant with guidelines set forth by the Market Research Society (MRS) before setting the survey live.

Once the survey is fully approved, we’ll create a “demo link” for it. The demo link looks just like the real survey will — it includes all the approved questions, the answer options, etc. and we’d encourage you to run through it a few times before we set the survey live. It’s a great way to double-check that everything looks how we want it to before the survey goes into the field.

In PR surveys for earned media, we are not able to include branded information. We need to remain unbiased within the survey, and telling respondents which brand commissioned the research could undermine that. That said, questions can be asked to gain insight into brand awareness, and those may include a logo — for example, “What organization has the following logo?” or “What do you think of the following logo?” are questions could be included in the survey.

Yes, we can do this, and we call this type of survey a “white label survey.” We’ll coordinate with you on the set up of the survey, then we hand over the link and you can send out the survey to be answered by your team, your customers, etc. Our team can then track the respondents as they take the survey, and we’ll supply you with the results when the survey reaches the desired number of respondents.

Yes! The Excel results are easy to read and our research team is happy to help if there are any questions about the data.

Splits for age, gender and region are standard within our survey results — beyond that, it can depend on the survey. For example, a survey about pets may include a split for cat owners vs. dog owners, while a back-to-school story may have a split for the child’s grade. We can create splits for any single-select questions (where the respondent selects one answer) included in the survey. That said, please let us know at the start of your project if there are specific splits you’d like to see, so we can ensure those questions are in the survey and quotas are set if needed to ensure statistically significant data. 

It’s important that our research results are reliable. Research data is statistically significant, if it is likely not caused by chance. For example, for a survey sample of 2,000 respondents, we typically need 80+ respondents in order to report on the data. If a statistic is pulled from less than 80 respondents, the margin of error is too high and the number can not be reported on.

We can set quotas within a survey, often based on the panel demographic, to ensure the data is statistically significant. A quota will guarantee a specific number of respondents (for example, we can set a quota for parents and ensure half the respondents have children).

Yes, we can create cross-tabs to show the connection between survey questions — for example, cross-tabulation of age and gender would reveal what millennial women or male baby boomers think about a specific topic.

At the end of the project, the client will own all the research.

While executive summaries are not a standard part of projects, this is absolutely something we can do. When requested, we’ll create an easy-to-read executive summary highlighting the key stat or stats from each question within the survey, which will be delivered to you as a Word document.

Absolutely! Our graphic design team creates infographics, animated infographics and social media packages every day — we’re happy to create those for any survey. We also offer a data visualization; this is similar to an executive summary as it highlights key stats from the data, but it’s presented in a more visual way. It’ll be shared with you as a PowerPoint, and has various charts within, which you’re welcome to use for presentations, press releases or anything else.