Panel Management with CISpanel

Online access panels (online panel) are used in the context of online research by market research agencies as well as by company market researchers. They consist of a pool of registered members who have expressed their willingness to participate in online surveys. From the pool of panel members, the panel operator selects a defined target group for each survey, using a variety of selection procedures, and invites them by e-mail to take part in the survey.

Panel construction and maintenance requires investment, including in your own customer base. But there are important and convincing arguments to justify the effort and expenditure:

• Surveys remain in your own hands and under your own control
• Rapid implementation through an existing pool of respondents
• Flexibility from fast, self-operated adaptation procedures
• No need for extensive screening because respondents are selected from a known pool
• Exclusive access to particular target groups in your customer base
• Contribution to customer loyalty and customer orientation

Effectively constructing, maintaining and updating a pool for an online access panel, inviting members to surveys, getting surveys completed successfully and ensuring precise control, demands professional panel management. As administrator, you face a mass of options for defining and steering the individual tasks. Therefore we understand the importance of ensuring that you always retain an overview in the truest sense of the word, in order to navigate your panel with confidence.

Your cockpit is equipped with instruments for managing the current project, defining all relevant basic data, setting up clear quality specifications, administering the respondent pool, and naturally also for handling incentives.

CISpanel provides all the tools you need for panel management. Here is a summary of its features:

• Automated and flexible quality management
• Graphical participant selection
• Participant interface in your corporate design
• Extensive project and participant statistics
• Time-controlled and response-sensitive invitations
• Optimized invitation process taking account of
  individual participant histories
• Unlimited, categorized attribute lists
• Menu-driven participant data maintenance
• Hierarchical authorization system
• Clear quota administration
• Flexible project structures
• Express import of participants from Excel
• Open interfaces to different survey systems
• Transfer of attributes between panel and questionnaire

Fig. 1: Selecting participants

The selection of potential participants is facilitated by a graphical tool. You can compile complicated and nested selection criteria in a flash, with no need to formulate queries. You pose the questions intuitively with your mouse, and CISpanel immediately responds with an analysis of the available participants.

Fig. 2: Quality criteria

With an online panel, once the participants have been recruited they can be surveyed repeatedly. The challenge here is to spread the burden among the participants as evenly as possible. CISpanel offers you a multiplicity of individually adjustable quality criteria for selection control.

Fig. 3: Automatic invitations

As many as necessary, as few as possible. This is the formula for the assured but economical management of panelist invitations. You define the desired daily rate of achieved interviews across the planned survey period. Based on this plan, and learning from past experience, the system continuously and automatically invites as many participants as you need to effectively fill the quotas. CISpanel automatically learns more with each successive project and every day of an ongoing project, so that over the course of the defined survey period its progress approaches closer and closer to the optimum. This saves time, helps guarantee successful completion, and avoids the danger of frustrating “rejected” participants.