In the world of evaluation and research you are constantly making connections and collaborations with people from a multitude of backgrounds and locations. The challenge to find the stakeholder you are looking for, establish trust, and engage them to respond can be daunting. At the Improve Group we have established some practices that help us reach the populations that are vital to the study and achieve a high response rate to our surveys and other data gathering methods.
1. Think about your population and how best to reach them
Engage with participants from your study ahead of time or with individuals who have similar characteristics and get their advice during the planning process. What materials and messages do they respond to? What communication methods are most effective for reaching out to them? Are they engaged regularly with any agencies that will know where they are and may be able to deliver a message to them for you?
2. Lay the groundwork and do the planning ahead of time
One of the best things you can do to prep for a longitudinal study is to ask your participants for their contact information ahead of time; let them know what you’ll be using it for and when you’ll be reaching out to them. Provide a phone number for how to get in touch with you on everything you send out and ask that they let you know if their contact information changes. For highly mobile and hard to reach clients ask them for 1-3 additional contacts who will know how to get in touch with them (also let them know to give these people a heads up that you may be contacting them). It’s best to get as much contact information for everyone as you can, apart from the usual phone, address and email; also ask for social network usernames and for permission to text message people. If you are working with populations that might be bunkin in on the couch or homeless, ask about which drop-in centers they usually use, shelters they are likely to use or which post office they would use for general delivery mail.
We recently got some great training from Ben Van Hunnik from Prodigy Research in preparation for our Minnesota National Youth in Transition Database study. He gave us some excellent advice about the advanced preparation we needed to do to maintain contact with young adults as they leave foster care.
3. Keep in touch even when you are not surveying
If you have the budget and the staff time stay in touch with people in other ways between surveys. Some ideas include sending birthday cards with gift cards (a great way to test addresses too), a Facebook page that is regularly updated with topics of interest to your population, regular contests or drawings for people who submit updated contact information, sending out coupons or other promotions, or creating a newsletter to be sent out via email or snail mail. Share the results of the study with participants throughout.
4. Try, try again
Don’t give up! Don’t be afraid to try multiple contact methods simultaneously such as sending a mailing, doing phone calls, emailing or going out to drop in centers to leave messages (be mindful of not harassing your participants). We’ve had success calling phone numbers the next day that were previously unavailable and having the call go through. We’ve Facebook messaged participants for weeks with no response, only to have them take the survey as a result of a phone call. We’ve called secondary contacts who have been rude, and others who have called the participant right away to have them get in touch with us. Be mindful when contacting secondary contacts not to reveal any information that would violate participant confidentiality.
There’s a fair amount of information that you can get by doing people searches on online white pages, or even just web searches. There are also many paid records searches that are inexpensive where you can access additional addresses and phone numbers to try. The idea is to be creative, innovative and pleasantly persistent.
In the world of evaluation and research you are constantly making connections and collaborations with people from a multitude of backgrounds and locations. The challenge to find the stakeholder you are looking for, establish trust, and engage them to respond can be daunting. At the Improve Group we have established some practices that help us reach the populations that are vital to the study and achieve a high response rate to our surveys and other data gathering methods.
1. Think about your population and how best to reach them
Engage with participants from your study ahead of time or with individuals who have similar characteristics and get their advice during the planning process. What materials and messages do they respond to? What communication methods are most effective for reaching out to them? Are they engaged regularly with any agencies that will know where they are and may be able to deliver a message to them for you?
2. Lay the groundwork and do the planning ahead of time
One of the best things you can do to prep for a longitudinal study is to ask your participants for their contact information ahead of time; let them know what you’ll be using it for and when you’ll be reaching out to them. Provide a phone number for how to get in touch with you on everything you send out and ask that they let you know if their contact information changes. For highly mobile and hard to reach clients ask them for 1-3 additional contacts who will know how to get in touch with them (also let them know to give these people a heads up that you may be contacting them). It’s best to get as much contact information for everyone as you can, apart from the usual phone, address and email; also ask for social network usernames and for permission to text message people. If you are working with populations that might be bunkin in on the couch or homeless, ask about which drop-in centers they usually use, shelters they are likely to use or which post office they would use for general delivery mail.
We recently got some great training from Ben Van Hunnik from Prodigy Research in preparation for our Minnesota National Youth in Transition Database study. He gave us some excellent advice about the advanced preparation we needed to do to maintain contact with young adults as they leave foster care.
3. Keep in touch even when you are not surveying
If you have the budget and the staff time stay in touch with people in other ways between surveys. Some ideas include sending birthday cards with gift cards (a great way to test addresses too), a Facebook page that is regularly updated with topics of interest to your population, regular contests or drawings for people who submit updated contact information, sending out coupons or other promotions, or creating a newsletter to be sent out via email or snail mail. Share the results of the study with participants throughout.
4. Try, try again
Don’t give up! Don’t be afraid to try multiple contact methods simultaneously such as sending a mailing, doing phone calls, emailing or going out to drop in centers to leave messages (be mindful of not harassing your participants). We’ve had success calling phone numbers the next day that were previously unavailable and having the call go through. We’ve Facebook messaged participants for weeks with no response, only to have them take the survey as a result of a phone call. We’ve called secondary contacts who have been rude, and others who have called the participant right away to have them get in touch with us. Be mindful when contacting secondary contacts not to reveal any information that would violate participant confidentiality.
There’s a fair amount of information that you can get by doing people searches on online white pages, or even just web searches. There are also many paid records searches that are inexpensive where you can access additional addresses and phone numbers to try. The idea is to be creative, innovative and pleasantly persistent.