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Most online qualitative platforms are now too complex and too expensive for small projects and pre-tasks. Liveminds is a simple, flexible, mobile platform that starts at just $350 a week. Since 2010, our expert team has helped thousands of researchers around the world run forums, diaries and homework tasks for 1 to 100 people, for a few days to a few months. 
 
 
The Liveminds platform powers a huge range of qualitative research objectives from product testing to creative development and usage and attitude studies. 
You can create and moderate conversations one-on-one, or in groups, with the time and space to go deeper and learn more. Present your participants with concepts, designs, adverts and get more honest, detailed feedback.
 
 
Or you can set people tasks and then follow their stories, to get context-rich insights that you’d often miss doing interviews or groups. Participants can respond in-depth and in the moment, bringing their opinions and experiences to life in text, images, videos, and audio. 
 
 
Liveminds works in 34 languages, enabling you to engage with over 4 billion people worldwide. With GPT-powered analysis tools coming towards the end of 2023, there is no easier or more affordable way to run your qualitative research online. 
 
 
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Liveminds is a simple, flexible, mobile qualitative platform that starts at just $350 a week. Perfect for smaller forums, diaries and  homework tasks.

Editor&#8217;s Intro: It seems that worrying over the state of online sample quality has been an ongoing and growing concern for <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/market-research-companies/new-zealand">market research</a>.  Innovative solutions are needed.  Hugh Carling of Liveminds provides a provocative viewpoint on how participant recruitment using social networks can help alleviate some of the challenges the industry is facing regarding sample quality.
Having read the GRIT Report for many years I didn’t think that I could still be shocked by the continued pessimism about the quality of participants in the industry, but I was. The statistic that blew me away wasn’t that ‘39% of researchers surveyed expect sample quality to worsen over the next three years’ &#8211; we carried out our own Research on Recruitment earlier this year and discovered much the same. The kicker for me this time was that ‘fewer than a third of sample providers expect panel quality to get better’!
It’s well known that researchers have long had limited options at their disposal, with most suppliers providing the same thing (and likely the same people), packaged slightly differently. What is a revelation is that there is such limited belief from suppliers that they can address this situation. The report’s conclusion that ‘the traditional model is no longer sustainable’ is clear. Yet most researchers are still relying on trying to find the right consumers on small, static databases. Even for surveys, these database are limited to 20 million repeat respondents globally. It’s time to break out of that rotting walled garden.
One of the major themes raised by those GRIT respondents who viewed sample quality as getting worse was that ‘the proliferation of surveys is stretching a limited resource (the respondent pool) too far’. So why go back to the same people again and again when it’s affecting the quality of research, the reputation of the industry and it’s fundamentally not necessary?
Even if we aren’t completely comfortable with it, we now realise that social networks and search engines know a great deal about us &#8211; more than our best friends and family in fact (<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.full">Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell</a>). Social ad networks allow us to hyper-target over 2 billion participants in 190 countries based on their demonstrated behaviour, demographics and interests. Marketing and advertising teams are routinely using these ad networks to personalise ads and reach their preferred consumers &#8211; why isn’t the research industry?
By finding fresh, representative participants for each project we will avoid the problem of repeat respondents getting fed up with re-entering their personal data or getting ‘survey fatigue’.
To look at the raw numbers &#8211; the biggest online panels have around 20 million online users worldwide and we&#8217;re told often struggle to find young and old recruits. Social networks have access to more than 2 billion online users worldwide, with hundreds of millions of Gen Zs and over 100 million aged over 60. Social ad targeting based on demographics, interests and behaviour can be used to find anyone; from the general population to fanatics of niche products and everything in between.
Using social networks for participant recruitment can’t be the answer for all projects. If you need to speak to people who don&#8217;t use the internet then you’d likely have more luck using a phone or going out into the street. Or if you’re doing a &#8216;gen pop&#8217; quant study, you’d probably be able to find that sample cheaper through a panel. However, panel recruits wouldn&#8217;t be fresh and would still have the associated negative issues that many researchers are well aware of. For typical qual and niche quant projects the cost of social network recruits tend to be the same or slightly lower than through existing databases. Recruiting through social networks is not perfect, and perhaps no method ever will be, but it is a huge leap forward from any approach that uses databases of repeat respondents as it&#8217;s starting point.
We recently did a study of our research platform, looking at more than 35 million English words submitted in online qual projects. We compared the responses of participants recruited using social networks vs. traditional methods, which included recruiters employed by a client base of nearly 200 companies. The participants found using social networks are genuinely keen to talk about subjects that are of interest to them and submitted 47% more data than than those found through traditional methods.
Now of course, no modern research article would be complete without at least a brief reference to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The good news is that by finding fresh participants for each project there is no requirement to maintain a database of repeat respondents’ personal data, so the GDPR is far easier to deal with than traditional methods. Once a given project is completed there’s no need to contact participants’ again, so their data can simply be deleted.
The opportunity already exists for the industry to stop relying, more out of hope rather than expectation, on damaged, depleting resources. If we don’t embrace that opportunity, clients will increasingly go elsewhere for the insights they need to make critical business decisions.
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Recruiting Participants the Same Way and Expecting Different Results

Editor’s Note: This post is part of our Big Ideas series, a column highlighting the innovative thinking and thought leadership at IIeX events around the world. Hugh Carlingwill be speaking at <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/events/iiex-europe">IIeX Europe</a> (February 19-20 in Amsterdam). If you liked this article, you’ll LOVE IIeX EU. <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/events/iiex-europe">Click here to learn more.</a>
What do researchers want from participants?
The new <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/grit">GRIT report</a> showed that &#8216;accessing quality and representative sample&#8217; is the single biggest challenge faced by researchers today. Declining participant quality is repeatedly raised in industry surveys, researcher discussion forums and at market research conferences so we commissioned <a href="https://liveminds.com/research-on-recruitment">Research on Recruitment 2018</a> to explore this critical issue in greater detail.
Many of the researchers in the study had experienced negative recruitment issues in the last twelve months. We heard about repeat respondents, unrepresentative participants, and even worse, people brazenly lying to get through screening. The researchers found these experiences professionally embarrassing, particularly when the truth was revealed in front of clients, such as: 
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">The bald man in a shampoo discussion group</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">The participant who asked when they would be doing a personification exercise</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">The woman with a cushion under her jumper pretending to be pregnant</li>
</ul>
<h3>Researchers want better participants</h3>
Researchers want better participants than they’re currently receiving and revealed what’s most important to them. Ensuring that participants closely match the recruitment specifications is the most important factor in effective recruitment. 97% of researchers in the study also stated that high quality recruitment is vital for good qualitative research. Ultimately, if the recruitment is wrong the credibility and integrity of the research is compromised. Researchers said they would pay more for participants who:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Accurately fit their specifications</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Are more reliable and motivated</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Are less likely to be repeat respondents</li>
</ul>
<h3>Professional participants are a problem</h3>
Most researchers saw professional participants as a problem in qualitative research. More than half of the researchers surveyed have seen repeat respondents in different research projects in the last year. More than half also believe too many participants lie to get recruited and that some recruiters encourage participants to lie.
<h3>How to get high quality participants</h3>
Maya Middlemiss sets out a comprehensive guide to getting the best recruitment for your user testing and qualitative research in ‘<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Participant-Principle-Maya-Middlemiss/dp/1908135735">The Participant Principle</a>’. With chapters on briefing recruiters, the recruitment screener and issues in recruitment the book is an excellent resource for any researcher wanting successful recruitment. 
<h3>How to design for maximum engagement</h3>
The GRBN’s Participant Engagement Initiative is a great industry endeavour to improve the user experience. Last year the group released <a href="http://grbnnews.com/grbn-initiatives/engage-handbook/">ENGAGE: 101 tips to improve the participant experience</a> which is an extensive set of best practice examples to help with engagement in research.
<h3>Tackling the problem at source</h3>
We’ve all experienced or heard horror stories of respondent recruitment failures. The research industry needs to find new ways to ensure we&#8217;re talking to authentic, representative consumers. It’s time to take recruitment into the social age &#8211; we can’t just keep doing the same thing and expecting something different to happen. 
Talks I’m excited to see at IIeX Europe:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://www.greenbook.org/events/iiex-europe">Impressions of an Optimist</a> &#8211; Didier Truchot, CEO &amp; Founder, Ipsos</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://www.greenbook.org/events/iiex-europe">Refreshingly Human: Challenges &amp; Solutions for Market Research in a Tech-Centric World</a> &#8211; Jenn Arrington-Korek, Senior Director, LRW Tonic &amp; Jessica Long, Research Director, LRW Tonic</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://www.greenbook.org/events/iiex-europe">Delivering Actionable Insights Through BeSci &amp; Cultural Anthropology</a> &#8211; Delia Jacobson, Director, Insight and Strategy, Fresh Squeezed Ideas</li>
</ul>

Research on Recruitment 2018

Share Your Research Recruitment Experiences
Effective recruitment and good sample quality are key challenges within the research industry, as the latest GRIT reports revealed. Clients and suppliers consider &#8216;being able to trust the results&#8217; and &#8216;sample/panel quality&#8217; as the most important factors in research study design (<a href="https://www.greenbook.org/grit">GRIT 2016 Q3-Q4</a>). But the very latest <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/grit">GRIT survey</a> found that 47% of insights buyers and 42% of research providers thought that sample quality was getting worse. Trust in sample quality within the industry is clearly low. 
We want to benchmark the views of qualitative researchers on the current state of research recruitment to help us recognise and understand the challenges faced by researchers, to explore opportunities for improving recruitment methods within the industry and to improve our Behavioural Recruitment services. 
We’d love qual researchers around the world to tell us their views on research participant recruitment in this 10-15 minute survey: <a href="https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/3787304/d18ef9e93db8">Take the Survey</a>
The report will be shared with all participants and one lucky participant will be randomly selected to receive $130.
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Can Research be Right if the Participants are Wrong?

Liveminds is a simple, flexible, mobile qualitative platform that starts at just
$350 a week. Perfect for smaller forums, diaries and homework tasks. London, United Kingdom.

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