Quest for Quiescence

Today I’m writing a follow up review of GreenfieldOnline.com. You can find the original review of Greenfield over here. Greenfield was a decent panel that did really well at some things and terrible at others let me tell you a little about my experiences.

Quantity of Surveys

Of the 50 surveys I received during the month long experiment, 26 of them were from Greenfield Online. Of these 26 surveys from Greenfield, I managed to complete 4 or 15%. When I say complete I mean surveys that I could actually get all the way through without being told that I do not qualify. Often you will be disqualified from a survey part way through if you do not meet the target demographic, or for some other reason do not meat the criteria for a particular study. With all the profiling surveys Greenfield had me fill out ahead of time, I expected to finish more than the 4 I did.

Duration

The average specified time to complete a survey was 20.58 minutes. In total I spent just under 2 hours completing surveys. Of those 2 hours, 30 minutes were spent on surveys that were never completed. That leaves 1.5 hours spent on surveys that were actually completed. Looking only at the surveys that were completed, the graph below shows a comparison of specified time vs actual time.

I found that the surveys could actually be completed in less than the specified time as long as you are careful with your answers. For example, say the survey asks “which of the following products have you tried”, and presents you with 10 options. You will often be expected to answer a series of questions for each of the products you select. So, if you selected 2 from that list of 10, you will probably be alright; If you selected 8… well, I hope your comfortable because you’re going to be busy for a while. As far as the surveys I didn’t complete, some of the them let me know fairly quickly that I did not qualify, however, several of them let me go on for several minutes (one as long as 9 minutes) before informing me that I would not be able to complete the survey. Why don’t they get those qualifying questions out of the way to begin with?

Compensation

Greenfield did not offer cash rewards for all of their surveys. Some of the surveys only offered an entry into a sweepstakes contest for $5000. I was less than excited about this. No doubt there are TONS of people taking these surveys and the chances are you’re not going to win the $5K. I’d prefer to receive a couple bucks guaranteed rather than a pie in the sky shot at $5K. 12 of the 26 surveys I received were for cash compensation. That’s 46%, so more than half of the surveys I received I was asked to complete for free (I did get the sweepstakes entry though). One thing Greenfield did do is compensate for each survey that was NOT completed by way of a sweepstakes entry. One interesting thing to note is that for a survey with a sweepstakes entry as a reward, you will actually receive a sweepstakes entry for attempting the survey even if you don’t complete it. So what’s the incentive to complete it? Again, I don’t place much value on those entries, so they were of little consolation to me anyway. The paid surveys I received had an average value of $3.73. Most of the paid surveys were worth $2 but a few were as low as $1 and a couple were actually worth $12 (of course I couldn’t complete either of those). Of the 4 surveys I actually completed, I earned cash for 3 of them. In total, for my 2 hours spent completing surveys, I received a total of $6. That’s $2 for each of the 3 surveys offering a cash reward. This puts my hourly rate at $3/ hour. Pretty sad really.

There is one really positive thing to say about Greenfield Online. They pay cash rewards via Paypal. I love this feature and don’t understand why anyone running a business that pays people for providing a service online (such as online survey completion) would compensate via check sent by snail mail? Doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, I requested payment of my $6 last night. Would you believe that I received the Paypal notification this afternoon! Even the confirmation message I received from Greenfield indicated it would take 2-3 weeks for processing. It’s true, less than 24 hours to receive payment (closer to 12 actually). I was very pleased with this aspect of Greenfield Online.

Other observations

There were a few disturbing things about the Greenfield surveys. A couple of times I received a survey in my inbox, but when I clicked on the link I was immediately told I had already completed the survey. Why would they send me surveys that I had already completed? Occasionally a survey would not present a full range of answers. This sometimes even happened after a pre-screener question. This forces you to provide a false answer. For example, if one question asks if you ever use film cameras and you say no, should the next question be a multiple choice asking if you go through 1-5, 5-10 or 10-20 rolls of film per week? Doesn’t make any sense. This is a fictitious example, but I did see this sort of thing several times.  I’d be a little upset about this if I was paying for survey research. NOTE: many of the surveys Greenfield delivered were setup by third parties so It’s possible that these ones did not come directly from Greenfield Online.

Conclusion

Greenfield provided a large number of surveys but I didn’t manage to make much money. There were a few usability quirks as well with some of the surveys completed. Only about half of the surveys received actually offered cash compensation. I would definitely recommend not bothering with any surveys that don’t offer cash.

I’ve got two more follow up reviews to complete for the other panels. After that I’ll do a comparison between the three panels I’ve been investigating and provide my recommendation as to which one is best. Don’t miss it.

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