Sampling Solutions

Suppose you were giving a party for a loved one and had rented a venue, hired a caterer, and got the word out to friends and family. How would you feel if…

…you didn’t know how to reach the people you most wanted to have attend? People you didn’t know (or like) who had been mistakenly invited (or not invited) showed up? Too few people showed up to be able to call it a “party”? What if people you cared about only stayed long enough to make a poor impression? What if people you used to care about stayed too long and wore out their welcome? What if people stayed away because they didn’t like what the caterer had to offer, the venue was shabby, or they had already been invited to too many parties?

Now imagine that you spent a lot of time and money on a research project and the same sorts of things happened. You couldn’t reach the right audience, and frauds and bots showed up instead. When the right people were reached, they weren’t interested in participating or weren’t engaged even if they chose to participate.

Sampling obstacles are greater than ever because of the infinitely increasing demand for more granular audiences, the plethora of “professional respondents” who are “professional” only in the sense that they get paid, and the challenges of creating engagement with people who are not tempted by traditional methods or who reflexively opt out of unsolicited approaches. However, the right technology solutions can help increase your reach, foster and grow engagement, and ensure quality, although the industry is divided with respect to which kinds of solutions solve challenges and which exacerbate them.

As we’ll see in the upcoming GRIT Insights Practice report, about two-thirds of insights professionals use some kind of automation for sampling, and nearly one-quarter on the buyer-side leverage AI for this purpose. Regardless of the type of research you conduct, finding, engaging, and evaluating the right audience is fundamental to success.