Boost your PR with newsmaker surveys

Our standard PR survey is 2,000 Americans. This number consistently allows us to delve into our main splits: age, gender and region. In order to have statistically significant data, you need a minimum of 80 respondents (though 100 or more is always better!) — 2,000 respondents means we typically have significant data for most of our splits, allowing us to report on that data.

This can differ for specialist panels and international research, for example:

• 5,000 respondents for a state-by-state.
• For international surveys, we often like to have 1,000–2,000 respondents per country, though that can vary based on the country’s size.
• Samples for niche panels can be determined with the help of the team to ensure the most efficient number of respondents for the survey.

This is flexible, and the number of questions is usually based on the type of survey. While custom research surveys will have a varying number of questions depending on the nature of the project, PR surveys that are conducted as part of earned media campaigns typically have about 20 questions.

We have a team of experienced researchers and journalists who know how to phrase questions to keep them compliant with market research standards while still ensuring the strongest data points. We’re happy to offer advice and suggestions while you’re drafting your survey, or we can draft the entire survey and share it with you for edits and feedback — it’s as collaborative a process as you’d like to make it.

There are many types of questions that we can include in our surveys. The most common questions are single-select questions — where the respondent can select one answer from the choices (yes/no, five-point scales, etc.) — and multi-select questions, where they can select multiple answers from a list of choices. We can include other question types, too, including free text questions, where respondents can add a longer response. We always recommend including a variety of question types within the survey to keep respondents engaged, prevent any “survey fatigue” and achieve the most compelling results.

We do offer clients the option of joining one of our omnibus surveys if you have a very small set of questions. This can be a cost-effective solution as you share the questionnaire and the cost of the research with other organizations.

Omnibus surveys are conducted at regular intervals, polling a ‘general population’ or ‘targeted audience’ sample of Americans. Contact our team for more details.

After the survey has been completed and quality checked, we export the data in an easy-to-read Excel file. This will include a “standard” tab that shows all the data, along with tabs for our “splits” — typically, this will break the data down by respondents’ age, gender and region. We can also offer further data splits, or cross-tabulation, which would show, for example, a tab based on respondents’ age and gender.

We can also put together executive summaries and data visualizations as alternative ways to understand the survey data. And, with our Talker editorial team, we can transform your findings into data-rich news stories.