Panel provider
A panel provider is a company that recruits, maintains and profiles large groups of people willing to take part in research, and sells access to them for surveys, interviews and tests. Researchers use providers to reach specific audiences quickly.
How it works
Providers recruit members through advertising, websites and partnerships, collect profile data such as demographics, occupation and purchase habits, and invite matching members to studies for incentives. Many also resell access to other panels, so one project's sample may come from several sources.
Choosing a provider is a quality decision. An AAPOR task force report on online samples covers how providers recruit and replenish their panels, how attrition and self-selection affect quality, and which measures go beyond response rates, and it ends with questions for researchers to put to panel vendors. Pew Research Center has found that opt-in samples can include bogus respondents that common checks miss.
A worked example
A beverage company compares two providers on the same 500-person survey. Provider A's data fails quality checks for 4 percent of respondents, Provider B's for 17 percent, most of them speeders and duplicate devices. The company pays more for Provider A on the next study.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
The questions AAPOR's task force suggests putting to panel vendors apply to any source of recruits, Pulse included, and Pulse's answer starts with recruiting to the brief's profile, with fraud checks on every one.