A panel is very much a work in progress – it’s never finished and needs constant nurturing, care and attention.  Panel maintenance is a major influence on panel quality therefore and is not just limited to data cleaning – it also includes how panel members are treated and how they feel.

We have a number of maintenance strategies to ensure quality is kept up:

- We make it easy to leave.  Unsubscribing is easy.

- Low frequency - we do not over burden our members.  Of all panels we send out the least invitations and surveys per user.  Most other panels send at least 2 surveys per month, some send 1 per week and some send unlimited invitations.  flyresearch stands alone on limiting surveys to one per member per month.

- Fair rewards - all client surveys are rewarded and longer surveys obviously deserve greater rewards

- Recent data - updating data is encouraged with prize draw entries.  We are also introducing a new Gold scheme to recognise “good” behaviours such as regularly updating data.

- Convenience – we allow members a reasonable time to finish surveys.  They can also log on at any time and update their data.

- Real customer service – we have FAQs of course but panel members emails, calls and queries are all dealt with by real people and not computerised helpdesks.

- Recruitment – constant recruitment ensures the panel grows and stays fresh

- Non response cleaning – non responsive panellists are regularly invited to be more active but if they have not responded after a certain period they are removed.  This ensures response rates stay high (and we target 25% but no higher).

- Bounce cleaning – some email addresses fail over time as people change jobs.  We encourage people to update this information in their account page but if this does not happen the account will be suspended to reduce bounce backs and increase response rates.

- Trust – we only ever use the panel for research and we work hard to establish trust with our members.  We protect their privacy with gusto (and invest to do so).

- Security – all survey invites are unique to the member, password protected and can be used only once.

- File size – we ensure that our surveys download quickly to avoid bandwidth bias (which favours people with broadband connections)

- Invites and reminders – we regularly send reminders to increase the response rate from the initial invited sample.  We never allow volunteer samples as it is not possible to control the representativeness of the sample then.

- Real time analysis – we can watch data in real time and respond rapidly before problems become significant

- Carrot and stick – as well as rewarding good behaviour we punish bad behaviour or survey fraud whenever we discover it (and we invest in developing systems to help us find it).