How are the Aha! online panels recruited?
Panelists are recruited mostly online via a cross section of portals and websites. Recruiting is also supplemented by on-location recruiting in areas with a high concentration of our target audience-the youth and young adults. Due to the very high Internet penetration levels in Hong Kong, on-location recruiting is not as essential as in countries with lower penetration levels.
How can you be sure that the panelist are who they say they are?
Determining whether the panelist is who they indicate they are online is challenging. One of the methods that we employ to validate their demography is through cross checks on their past responses, e.g. age range compared to year of birth. We also validate in-person when we recruit them on-location or when they come in-person to collect their incentives.
What is the difference between the Aha! online panel and other online marketing database?
The Aha! online panel is comprised of consumers who all have double opted-in to participate in surveys about products and services. They were clearly informed about the terms and conditions of their participation, our privacy policy, and most of all, that they were recruited exclusively for market research purposes. Aha! Research collects a broad range of demographics, products ownership and usage, and extensive information on a wide variety of subjects. This information is extremely useful in selecting individuals with a specific profile to participate in a targeted survey project.
The extent of this information is most often not available in the standard marketing databases where individuals may have opted-in to receive information from specified companies, but they most likely have not opted-in to participate in research surveys. Participation rates in surveys are known to be extremely low among people in marketing databases.
What response rates can be achieved with the Aha! online panel?
The participation of Aha! panel members is encouraged through our continuous reinforcement on the importance of their consumer voice, and through our rewards programmes. We constantly aim to offer a well-managed panel that will result in higher response rates but could vary depending on the survey topic, target respondent group, and the length of the survey.
How are panelists invited to participate in a survey?
Panelist are randomly selected from the general database, or randomly within a special segment of consumers as may be required by a specific research project such as women, ages 18-24, who have completed tertiary education and own an MP3 player.
Panelists are invited via email with links to the secure area of the Aha! panel website. Only registered and approved panel members may securely log into their account to participate in the selected survey. Neither the survey objectives nor the name of the client company or products are ever disclosed to the panelists.
What are the guidelines of panel utilization?
We believe in panel utilization that would give us an optimum level of participation without exhausting the panelist. By monitoring the usage, we maximize panelist interest and avoid the development of "professional" respondents. Panelists are employed in accordance with established industry guidelines.
Can the Aha! online research panel be employed for any marketing or sales campaigns?
All Aha! Panelists have been recruiting and opted-in under the clear understanding and agreement that their participation is limited to providing their opinions about products and services by responding to research surveys, opinion polls, or a selected form of voicing their consumer feedback. We believe that our panelist’s primary motivation to participate is based on their interest to share information and not to receive information.
All our panelists are protected by our privacy laws which are based on local Hong Kong standards as well as that of international research organizations such as the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR) of which Aha! Research is a member in good standing.
Will we get the same survey findings online compared to offline methods such as telephone interviewing?
The answer to this question is highly correlated with the level of Internet penetration in the country where the survey is conducted. As Hong Kong has one of the highest levels of Internet penetration in the world, we most often achieve no significant differences between research findings of offline and online surveys.
Do we lose control of a survey if its not administered by an interviewer?
It is a known fact that an interviewer can highly affect the answers provided by respondents. It is also almost impossible to achieve consistency in the way interviewers administer questionnaires due to their means of clarifying, probing, and their overall interaction with the respondent. These can all bias the results. We believe that all respondents must be exposed to the exact same stimuli to protect the integrity of the responses and research results. This is best achieved by self-administered online surveys.
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