How to Choose a Polling Company

How to Choose a Polling Company

When choosing a polling company, the first thing to do is establish who you want the respondents for your survey to be.

Business Surveys

For businesses, respondents could be employees, current customers and clients, or prospective customers and clients. Each respective group can provide you with unique perspectives on the products or services that your company currently provides, as well as products and services that your company may provide in the future.

Everything from pricing, to advertising, to features of products and services, to customer relations and policies can be addressed. The information that you get from a business survey can provide you with critical insight with which to increase your success.

Political Surveys

For those who are running for office, backing an initiative, or wanting to know how people view current or proposed policies, it is best to have respondents for your survey be registered voters in the area affected.

You can also limit respondents to likely voters, based on considerations like having voted regularly in the past, in order to ensure that those responding are those most likely to turn out to vote.

Additionally, you can choose to further limit respondents to members of a specific political party, age group, or gender, which allows you to get the information you need to focus your message.

Questions

Once you establish who your respondents will be, the next thing will be to put together a list of questions. A good polling company will use your questions verbatim if you want, but will also be willing to help you develop the questions if you wish, so that they can be best suited to secure the insights you need.

Results

It is also important for the polling company that you choose to provide the results in the format that is optimal for your purposes. This can include easy-to-read tables of all responses, charts that can be shared at meetings and in company publications. Crosstabs, which let you cross-reference answers and see how different demographic groups responded, also add tremendous value to results packages. A good polling company should provide all of those at no additional cost.