Cvent Survey

When I begin to plan a survey project, I follow the six step process for market research. But there's always critical decisions to be made throughout the development of a survey: what kind of sampling method to use, what questions to ask, what survey method is best for this project? One we often take for granted is whether or not to conduct branded or blind research. Like with most decisions, there are pros and cons to both approaches.

Blind Survey Research. Blind surveys are where the sponsor or organization conducting the survey is unknown. This means any organization information is not presented in the questionnaire. If you plan to use email marketing to solicit responses for an online survey, you'll need to consider a third party. Due to CAN-SPAM rules, you must identify the organization you are sending emails from and include address information. This rules out the possibility of you emailing survey invitations to respondents from your own email client.

Branded Survey Research. Brand surveys don't try to hide who is conducting the survey. The brand is right there on the survey. With Cvent, it's easy to conduct branded surveys that match your organization's color scheme and include your logo. With Cvent's new survey URL customization feature, you can take that a step forward and include your organization's name in the URL.

So what are the pros and cons? Surveyors tend to see higher response rates with branded survey research because people are more willing to complete a survey when they know who is sponsoring it. On the other hand, you have the possibility of introducing acquiescence bias into your survey results. People tend to have the need to please and acquiescence bias is just that. It's where the respondent has a tendency to agree with questions or give positive feedback to the survey conductor regardless of their true feelings. You'll need to weigh the pros and cons of branded versus blind surveys and decide for yourself which is right for your project. For a customer or employee survey it wouldn't make sense to do a blind survey, so in some cases your decision is easy. Market researchers on the other hand may struggle a bit more.