Collecting High Quality Data From Your Online Participants

If you’re building an experiment in Gorilla, you’ll need to decide how to recruit and reward your participants. If you want a random sample of a particular demographic, and you have plenty of budget available, a participant recruitment service can be a great way to go.

Alternatively, you might prefer to choose your own participant pool. You may want to crowdsource on social media, collaborate with a charity or other organisation, or get the word out about your study with a PR campaign.

In any of these cases, recruiting your own participants gives you control and flexibility. It also means you’ll need to set up your own system to reward participants for their time.

It’s important to reward participants fairly to ensure they feel motivated, engaged and valued, which is both good for them and good for your data quality! The downside is that it can be too time consuming to contact all of them about a small payment.

Consequently, researchers often resort to a raffle scenario “One random participant will receive £50 for their time. While everyone else gets £0.”

But what if there was a better way to gift participant a token of appreciation in return for their work, without the administrative hassle? That’s where BHN Rewards comes in.

Simplify and Streamline the Rewarding Process with BHN Rewards

BHN Rewards is a digital incentives management tool that takes the admin work out of rewarding your participants. Instead of offering your participants a 1/50 chance at a $50 Amazon voucher, you can offer everyone a guaranteed dollar off their next coffee.

In addition to the aforementioned benefits, BHN Rewards is GDPR-compliant, and offers enhanced security features to protect participant anonymity, such as data-masking and the de-coupling of personal identifiable information (PII) from the data collection platform.

The BHN Rewards platform supports two different styles of incentives:

1. Instant Rewards – where participants receive the digital reward in their email immediately after completing a survey.

2. Points-to-Rewards – where participants earn points for each action they complete. Their points are accumulated over time and when they reach a set threshold, their points are redeemed for a desirable digital reward. This is a popular option for longitudinal studies that require continued participation.

Creating a Delightful Rewarding Experience for Participants

With BHN Rewards, academic researchers can deliver a delightful recipient experience; the extensive reward catalog features leading brand names such as Starbucks, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, as well as prepaid Visa and MasterCard. The Smart Global Choice feature pre-detects the recipient’s location and shows them a list of rewards available in their country.

BHN Reward’s 100% refund policy for unclaimed rewards decreases budget waste. More than 150 colleges and universities utilize BHN Rewards for their research programs.

Integrate BHN Rewards with Gorilla

To make using BHN Rewards in your experiment easy, there is now an integration available to add to your Gorilla account.

Visit your Gorilla My Account page and select the Integrations tab to find the BHN Rewards integration. There is also support information available on the BHN page.

Gorilla offers a number of recruitment policies, from a simple link you can share on social media, to supervised or Email ID policies which allow you to invite a specific list of people to participate.

If you still want to give participants a 1/50 chance of winning $50 and 49/50 chance of a cup of coffee that’s still possible. Simply randomise participants to to two different BHN Rewards end points — one with the big prize and one with the cup of coffee.

With BHN Rewards, paying your participants is one more thing that’s now easier to do. Let us know how you plan to use the integration and how you get on.

Happy Experimenting!

Jo Evershed

Jo is the CEO and co-founder of Cauldron and Gorilla. Her mission is to provide behavioural scientists with the tools needed to improve the scale and impact of the evidence-based interventions that benefit society.