How to find free participants for your survey
You've created a great survey and you’re already imagining the potential results. There's just one crucial step standing in your way; you need to find participants. But not everyone has a big budget. Thankfully, there's no need to worry. Here are 3 popular methods you can use to find people to complete your survey:
1. Distribute to your community
Distributing your survey to your existing community is the most common approach taken by people carrying out their research using OpinionX .
This method is suuuuper easy; just copy a survey link and email it to your community. Things aren’t always this easy though - we don’t all have access to a perfect spreadsheet of emails. There are a few ways that you can get creative with survey links and the inbound traffic or followers you have.
SproutPlans founder Niamh de Búrca embedded her OpinionX survey on her startup's landing page (using a simple 'copy and paste' block of code called an iFrame) which allowed her to survey people checking out her website before she had any users on her product (explained in Niamh's case study). Another option is to integrate a chat popup like Intercom (free alternatives for those on a budget include Drift and tawk.to) on your website and include your survey link in a conditional popup message that greets new visitors.
The key is to get creative! Use simple methods like these to turn website visitors into survey participants. To get website visitors in the first place, consider writing and promoting a few blog posts, look for a community shoutout slot on a relevant industry newsletter, or simply ask friends and family to help you out by sharing the survey link with their network.
2. Promote your link publicly
Social media and online forums are a great place for gathering survey responses. It's cheap, convenient, and easy to reach large numbers of people. Forums in particular are a great resource for survey creators trying to find specific people with a niche interest, background or attribute all in one place. Depending on your approach, public promotion on the internet can enable you to gather a broad undefined sample or a well-defined segment if you seed your OpinionX survey link in these niche communities.
Publicly promoted surveys benefit hugely from having a good incentive. Once again, this is a great opportunity to get creative to stand out from the crowd. The most common reward is the raffled gift voucher, but you should think about other ways that you might be able to offer value in exchange for participation in your OpinionX survey; whether that's a free ebook, access to an unlisted podcast, a 30-minute Zoom call with a well-known industry expert, or even a free account on a great premium product. There are plenty of ways you can catch people's attention and gather rich insights with the right incentive.
For example, when Offie founder Patrick Erichsen created his first OpinionX survey to validate his startup idea, he didn't have any users or existing community to target. What he did have, however, was a very particular target participant in mind; a young professional working remotely while traveling. Patrick jumped over to the r/AirBnB community on Reddit as well as online community Remote Clan and posted links to his remote working survey along with a quick description of his research project. Within a few hours, he had a full sample of participants and voting data ready to analyze.
3. Direct message your target audience
If you have no existing community to engage but you know what kind of people you need for your survey, a direct outreach approach can quickly source a robust sample size if you know the right techniques.
Slack Outreach
This is a method that we used at OpinionX to find 149 product managers for our own survey. With just a few hours of work, we found a Slack community where we knew that our target participants were hanging out. Instead of just posting the survey link publicly into one of the main channels, we sent friendly personalized messages to a filtered list and received a 25% response rate.
Here's how to do it:
Using a search phrase like "Top Slack Communities for _____", find a large Slack community relevant to your target participant type.
Once you've joined, search the job title of the participant type that you're targeting. In our case, it was product managers.
3. Click the "People" tab to filter just to users and hit "Exclude deactivated accounts" to hide inactive users. In this case, one Slack community provided a list of 2,298 product managers available for direct message.
4. Finally, write a polite outreach message explaining what you are doing and why their help would be appreciated. If you don't spend the time to write a good message, people will just feel like you are using them. Instead, give the person an opportunity to get something in return for their time; whether that's just the satisfaction of helping someone or offer a favor as thanks.
Here is an example of a message that worked well for our cold Slack outreach:
Hi James, I'm working on a startup idea that helps product managers and I'm trying to understand what the biggest challenges PMs face at work. Would you have 2 minutes to share your opinion? It would really help us out a lot to hear from a product manager like you! And please let me know if there's anything I can do in return for your time? Thanks a million :)
We sent ~600 of these messages to product managers on Slack and received 149 responses - not bad for one evening of work! The best part about this outreach method is that it's so warm and personal that's really easy to find people willing to follow up the survey with a short call to learn more about their answers and experience.
Twitter Outreach
It may be surprising for some but Twitter is a great place to find survey participants. This is particularly true if there is lots of online conversation about your topic of interest. Use the search bar to find people who are talking about your topic of interest. I guarantee you that you'll be surprised at how many Twitter users have their accounts set to allow direct messages from anyone.
Referencing an old tweet of theirs is a great way to show that you're not doing a mass-spam outreach like a bot account. As with Slack, a friendly and personalized outreach will get a solid response rate.
For example, searching for "working remote" with a search criteria of 10 likes or more will raise a solid list of recent tweets from real people.
Instantly, we've got a list of self-qualified leads for our survey. In the example above, all three accounts have their DMs set to open and have shown personal experience with remote working in the past week.
Don't worry about learning off keywords like "min-faves:" - Twitter has a whole feature to help you to carry out advanced searches.
Other Platforms
Like the "min-faves:" search term on Twitter, there are great terms you can use to custom filter searches on Google. Darko from ZeroToUsers posted this great guide to finding public Google Sheets documents in March 2020 and this guide to finding 'easy to win' Quora posts in January. Once you see the patterns in these search methods, they can easily be applied to other social media platforms better suited to direct outreach like Reddit and Twitter.
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Finding free survey participants is possible, it just requires a tenacious attitude and some good old fashioned grafting.