If you are a big doer of surveys (known in scientific circles as a “survey-doer”) you may have heard of Routing. Or maybe not – it’s only a few years old and it’s sort of an “inside baseball” term.

Anyway, routing means that, if your survey company works with a larger consortium of survey companies (as MindField does now) then you log in to a certain survey opportunity, then maybe you don’t qualify, and then the big computer in the sky keeps pulling you along to the next opportunity, and the next, until it finds a survey that you qualify for.

Basically, the practice has several benefits for the survey companies and the clients who commission the surveys. For the panelist, maybe not so much. You do eventually qualify for something, but how long will that take? The answer is, it varies between survey companies.

It leads to one of the biggest complaints panelists have about routing: Respondent Fatigue. And it’s a big reason that MindField doesn’t do it!

At MindField, we make our best attempt to target the sample to the needed qualifications and should you not qualify you are finished with that opportunity rather than being passed around until something finally fits.

In the research we conducted, we found routing to be a huge complaint among panelists and something we listened to.

In other news: Email avalanche! One panelist asked, “I’m getting 30 email invites a day! I’m overwhelmed! Is that normal?” Well, going forward, no. This is one reason we are going to the Survey Cloud. With all these new opportunities, you would be bombarded with invites! So, invites are ramping down while Cloud is ramping up – and we are in this temporary “between time” that will end shortly.

So, again, a time of change, growth and increased opportunity. Will we break a few eggs along the way? Probably. We just ask for your continued patience as we build a bigger, better MindField for you!