Designing and communicating incentives – Reader participation invited!

By Rajesh Setty on Mon 26 Jun 2006, 10:54 PM - 9 Comments

Three months ago, I wrote about the need to understand the power of incentives. What I forgot to mention that all bets are off if you don’t know how to communicate those incentives to the right people.

Here is a recent request to participate in a survey. The target audience is people who are maintaining their own websites/blogs – basically knowledge workers.

As you can see, the participant has no idea what the incentive is but knows that he or she has to invest 30 minutes of time giving all sorts of information that will benefit the company that is conducting the survey. May be some people will fall for it and spend those precious 30 minutes. I talked to ten people and eight of them said they will pass this “opportunity” and the two of them said they want to participate. Probing further, I found that the two wanted to participate because they were curious to know what the company wanted to know.

Now, the key thing to remember is that the eight that don’t want to participate won’t tell the survey creator that they are not participating. They just move on.

What can we learn from this? Create the right incentives and communicate them if you want to use incentives to motivate people to act in a certain way. Otherwise, just make a request without an incentive. The results probably may be almost the same.

Here’s a call for reader participation:

Question:

What could have been a good incentive for the company to offer to get more participants for this survey? Why?

What’s in it for you?

Please post your responses in the comments (no registration necessary). If I get at least ten responses in the next few days, I will offer to send a signed copy of my book “Beyond Code“(foreword by my hero Tom Peters) to the best response as judged by one of my mentors.

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Posted in the Compelling Offers, Main Page category.

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Anonymous on June 27th, 2006

Hi Rajesh,
I think the best incentive for the website can be a book/information material that will help the users to increase the traffic to their website, since all the users have their own webpages on the Internet.

Anonymous on June 27th, 2006

I would like to disagree with Prashant – not sure if everyone has a web-site…
In my humble opinion – there are 2 options:
1. Offer small merchandize to all survery participants (mugs, mousepads etc.) or some form of download materials – which are consistent with the site theme
2. Do not offer prize to everyone – but make a lottery and give prizes to 2-3% of respondents. The prize shall be significant enough to attract people – this might be a service or product sold on the site that is worth $200-$300 or more.

Anonymous on June 27th, 2006

I would reword the request like this:
We need you! We are conducting a study about how you maintain your websites/blogs and would like your opinion. It will take about 30 minutes and you’ll get a iPod nano in appreciation of your time. Thank you!

Anonymous on June 27th, 2006

Dear Rajesh,
Many of us surf the web to gain data, information and knowledge to use in our studies, work or private life.
For myself as a student I am always trying to learn as much as possible from others on the web (that’s why I read marketing blogs).
Therefore my best incentive would be: knowledge.
If I help them, I want something in return (ROI).
I can buy stuff myself but knowledge is harder to come by. This is why I would like insight in what it is they do with the data I provide them with.
How do they gather it (data mining)? How do they analyze it (turning data into information)? What do they do with this information in the organization (turning information into knowledge for the corporate strategy)?
This would help me a great deal in getting insight in how others do it, hence I would have learned something. They would have given me something invaluable. Not only I could get this but every participant who is interested, no lotteries, no taglines to finish and also no price giving ceremonies.

Anonymous on June 27th, 2006

Hi Rajesh,
Nice excersize,
As mentioned in your post, the target audience is people who are maintaining their own websites/blogs. And the company is conducting a study about websites.
So I am assuming that user might be answering the questions based on his or her own experiences regarding their own website. The survey might be asking on varied range of topics such that website development, content of website, website traffic generation, usability, user satisfaction, website navigation, revenue generation and much more.
So that survey company will take all this detail information from different users and will do some data analysis/mining and then will compile it in one generalised form. Now the biggest incentive to that user can be knowing some improvements or modifications as a feedback for his/her website based on the collected information by that survey company.
For example, after collecting all information, the advisers from company may analyse individuals’ website, and based on their collected studies, they may suggest some improvements in traffic generation, revenue generation methods or better usabilty aspects of users’ website. So that user is getting benefited by making more business and generating more revenue if its a commercial website or generating more traffic if its a personal blog.
I think getting personalised feedback to improve our own website, can be the biggest incentive for the website owner.
Thanks,
-Aditya

Anonymous on June 28th, 2006

“Take our survey and you could win a year’s worth of free hosting at SomeFamousHost at your own domain” – to attract bloggers who would like to move from free hosted solutions to their own domain name.
Or offer the first n respondents a signed copy of “Beyond Code”

Anonymous on June 28th, 2006

Since the participants are people that own websites or blogs, I am sure traffic is very important to them. My incentive would be a link to one lucky winner’s website/blog from a specific well known website/blog for a specific period of time.

Anonymous on June 29th, 2006

Rajesh, I have to tell you that I usually don’t click on surveys but I saw one where they said: “Fill out this survey for a cash reward!” and I clicked on it only because of your post on incentives. I think it is the same survey you are talking about. They write ‘cash reward’ to get you to click but they don’t clarify how much. They then pre-qualify you for the survey with a bunch of questions without telling you how many questions or how much in $. Only on qualifying was I told that I would get $15 for the rest of the survey which would take 15 minutes. If I hadn’t qualified, I wonder if my answers were in vain! I will supposedly get $15 in another 6-8 weeks. Like your friends, I did it cos I wanted to know what they wanted to know!

Anonymous on July 5th, 2006

I don’t think the reward is as important as presenting the information in a no nonsense manner. Would you prefer:
“Recieve $15 for taking our 30 minute survey!”
or
“Take our survey and win cash for your participation!”
Option #2 is automatically passed up by any person familiar with common advertisements on line, where as option #1 would probably get many more hits. I think it’s sad that I see concise advertisements so sporadically that I refer to them as “refreshing.” Curiosity used to kill the cat, but now all the coolest cats know better.