ESOMAR is a global community that brings together research professionals and service providers to help drive the insights industry forward. The goal is to guide the industry in maintaining the highest standards of research practices, thus gathering the the highest quality data and using those insights to improve the human experience. With this goal in mind, they have created the “ESOMAR 37”: Questions to Help Buyers of Online Samples. Here, we highlight a few of the answers to those important questions that set iMAD Research apart. To find the complete list of iMAD’s answers to the ESOMAR 37, click here.

1.) What experience does your company have in providing online samples for market research? How long have you been providing this service? Do you also provide similar services for other uses such as direct marketing? If so, what proportion of your work is for market research?

Since 2017, iMAD Research has successfully connected hundreds of thousands of B2B professionals, Healthcare professionals and Consumers with ad agencies, market research companies and corporate brands. Our respondents have expressed explicit interest in sharing their opinions via online survey research.  iMAD Research never utilizes our proprietary panel for any other reasons, including direct marketing campaigns.  We dedicate 100% of our resources towards providing best in class online data collection services for the purposes of market research only.

2.) Do you have staff with responsibility for developing and monitoring the performance of the sampling algorithms and related automated functions who also have knowledge and experience in this area? What sort of training in sampling techniques do you provide to your frontline staff?

iMAD does not use algorithms.  Instead, all sampling is done in-house by our experienced project management team. iMAD’s frontline staff has an average of 6.5 years of sampling and project management experience in the market research industry. When new members join the client services team, there is a two week comprehensive training program followed by another two weeks of “on the job training” where new Project Managers are “shadowed” by an experienced iMAD Project Manager.  In addition to the initial training program, the team undergoes frequent re-training and refresher courses to ensure that best practices are maintained and client requests are adhered to.

3.) For work where you program, host, and deliver the survey data, what processes do you have in place to reduce or eliminate undesired in-survey behaviours, such as (a) random responding, (b) Illogical or inconsistent responding, (c) overuse of item nonresponse (e.g., “Don’t Know”) (d) inaccurate or inconsistent responding, (e) incomplete responding, or (f) too rapid survey completion? 

iMAD Research is committed to provide the highest data quality and consistency to our clients by eliminating undesirable survey behaviors. In order to achieve this, we’ve implemented numerous quality measures and procedures including –

• Digital fingerprinting

• Geo restrictions

• Quality checks at different survey intervals

• Timing metrics to avoid sending consistent speeders to surveys 

• Providing break points to improve respondent experience

• Survey logic

• Review of open-end responses

By utilizing the above-mentioned security techniques, we ensure poor quality or redundant respondents are prevented from impacting the overall data quality by blacklisting them permanently from our survey platform. In addition, iMAD works with a third-party anti-fraud technology partner, Research Defender, to provide an added layer of data security.

As members of the ESOMAR organization ourselves, iMAD Research takes quality control very seriously and we pride ourselves on proactive and full disclosure of our business practices overall, and with each and every project we complete with our clients. For a complete list of iMAD’s answers to the ESOMAR 37 questions, click here. If you have any other questions, or you’d just like to see what iMAD can do for you and your business, contact us any time at [email protected].