EMI – Over 6 million surveyed

Last week we completed our 6 millionth interview on our Swift Dashboard since its creation in 2009. Swift is our proprietary dashboard that gives us visibility to monitors live studies, aggregates multiple sample sources, and provides digital fingerprint technology.  We wanted to reflect on some things we’ve learned in the past 6 million surveys!

• The sample landscape is constantly changing.  We’ve used over 200 different providers of sample since SWIFT’S creation.  Many of them have combined or are no longer in business.  Many we’ve only used once or twice for only internal research on research to evaluate them.  Many others have been in our network from the start.
• These surveys are across 143 different countries, including Serbia, Dominican Republic and Burma.
• There is certainly duplication across panel providers.  It’s surprising how many respondents are members of multiple panels.  We try to account for that when bidding and executing studies, but it’s challenging as the duplication varies a lot by respondent type, study type, and country.
• The incidence rate on studies we’ve worked on has remained relatively constant over time.   This may be the nature of the studies we work on, but despite new technologies and better targeting, we haven’t seen an increase in IR on our studies.
• The length of interview varies quite a bit but has increased modestly over the past 9 years.
• Many months are significantly busier than others.   Likely a function of client’s fiscal years (and not a surprise to anyone), some months are just busier than others, with up to a 25% difference in our busiest to slowest months.

Overall, it takes a lot of people and support to accomplish this.   The EMI team has remained incredibly efficient to accomplish this.

To our 200+ partners we’ve worked with over the past few years, thank you!

To all of our clients that make all of this possible, we especially thank you!!