Incentives can be an excellent way to increase completion rates for your surveys, but there are some potential pitfalls if you plan to use them. Read on for our best practices for using incentives.
- If you're going to use incentives, you need to use them for all participants in your survey. If you don't use them for all participants and someone finds out, they will be upset. It provides a much better client experience to use them across the board.
- In our experience, low-income clients prefer certain and immediate incentives (like a gift card) over lottery-style incentives.
- If you do use a lottery-style incentive, there are often state regulations that you need to be in compliance with. You typically need to provide the rules, odds of winning, etc.
- Cash incentives (or gift cards to stores that are commonly available) perform much better than online-only incentives. We have used Target and CVS gift cards as incentives and seen them perform well. They can be sent electronically but redeemed in-store.
- The #1 source of client inquiries we receive are related to incentives. If you send them, you need to be prepared to support client questions around redemption, expiration, etc.
- Using incentives can "poison the well". That is, once you start using them for one survey, you'll have to continue to use them since clients will be expecting them.
If you have further questions about incentives, or would like to enable them for your account, please contact your Community Connect Account Manager.