Incentive (noun)
- Something that incites or tends to incite to action or greater effort, as a reward offered for increased productivity.
Offering incentives to potential research participants can be a great motivator that bolsters recruitment and saves you time and money. This month we’ll share our experience with offering incentives to motivate people to participate in surveys, focus groups, or interviews. In our next Improve Groove newsletter, we’ll share current research about using incentives.
When appropriate, The Improve Group uses incentives to motivate people to participate in research. Incentives are an extrinsic motivator, a reward to encourage participation. They are particularly useful when respondents’ intrinsic motivation (desire to participate for the sake of participating) is weak.
When selecting an incentive, it’s important to think carefully about the people you want to engage and determine what they will find truly motivating. In our experience, incentives have the greatest impact on motivation when they are aligned with something our respondents care about. Some examples of incentives we have used are:
- Gift certificates for a full-service grocery store or recreational facility for a study on healthy eating/physical activity
- Access to specialized information about human resources for completing a survey about hiring in nonprofits
- Donations to an organization of the participants’ choice for people that have already been volunteering in their communities
Does it work? Yes! When using incentives, we consistently get response rates higher than we planned. For example, in our longitudinal study of youth who have experienced foster care, incentives have helped us build a strong, lasting, relationship. We consistently attain response rates above 85% for each of the targeted populations. In contrast, one federally-funded study does not allow us to use incentives; participation rates have lagged far below expectations and our costs of continuous follow-up and recruiting have far exceeded what we would have spent on incentives.
Offering incentives that appeal to research participants is a reliable way to maximize response rates and limit the amount of time spent on recruiting and following up.
In our next article, we will share research about incentives that addresses:
- Are there types of incentives that are the most motivating?
- Is there a minimum monetary value for incentives?
- Are there some populations that do not respond well to incentives? and
- Does offering an incentive change the way respondents answer questions?
For previous articles we have written on incentives and increasing response rates, visit: