Most of our clients are constantly in touch with our project managers, but they hardly get the chance to see what's going on behind the scenes of an online panel. We think this is really unfortunate, because especially panel managers contribute a lot to the high quality of our services. In the following articles on this blog, we’d like to give them credit for their work and present their daily challenges and considerations.

But first of all, let’s have a look at what an online panel is. An Online Access Panel is a platform for people who have expressed their general willingness to regularly participate in online surveys. As the panel members have been profiled after joining the community, they can be invited to just the right studies.

This definition raises some questions, of course. For example...

• Who exactly are those people who expressed a willingness to participate? Are they in any way different than the average? How did they even get to join the panel?
• How do we sustain the loyalty of our panel members and make sure they stay within our community? What’s in for them?
• How do we make sure that our panelists activities within the panel contribute to our clients’ research projects? How do we maintain quality?

In the next couple of blog posts will answer these questions and give you more insights into who our panelists are, how we keep them motivated and how we make sure that the response quality is high. As the blog series continues, we will edit this article and create a table of contents.

• What’s the key issue of Panel Management?
• The basic principles of Panel Recruitment
• Panel Size - Does it really matter?
• Who are our panellists? The importance of profile information