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Another source of participants are the many companies that run large online research panels.

You We can use a commercial panel by itself, or as an addition to your other recruitment channels (to help fill out your our desired numbers).

Users sign up to these panels to earn rewards for doing online studies. When they sign up, the company collects all kinds of information about them – demographics, buying habits, hobbies, and so on. This creates a large database that can be queried for specific types of participants (e.g. women aged 40-60 who shop online at least once a month).

When you we (as a researcherresearchers) ask the company for participants, you we can then specify what which kind of people you’re we’re looking for.

While each research panel is different, the process typically goes like this:

• You We find an online panel you we want to use, based on what kind of users they offer in your our region, how much they charge, and whether their participant system can work with your our online testing tool. This usually involves studying their website and emailing them specific questions.
  
  
• You We set up an agreement with the panel company, specifying how many users you we want and how much you we will pay for that number of responses.
  
  
• You We configure your our online study to receive participants from the panel. Usually this involves receiving a “participant identifier” from each incoming participant, then notifying the panel when that participant has completed the study (so the participant can earn their reward from the panel company).
  
  Some tree-testing tools let you us configure this as part of your our study. Others may require you us to do a bit of extra work or ask the vendor to help you us set it up, while others or may require you us to ask each participant for their identifier so you we can send it back to the panel company later.
  
  
  

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In terms of quality of the results you we get, research panels follow the same caveat as most other recruiting methods – you we will always get a small percentage of participants who race through the test and give “dummy” answers, just so they can get the reward.

We haven’t found these paid panels to be any worse than other methods in this regard (and, in fact, some of them actively cull members who don’t give a decent effort, if you notify them notified about specific cases), but remember that regardless of the methods you we use to recruit, you we will still need to watch for garbage responses when you we analyze your the data later. (See Cleaning the data in Chapter 12.)

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While recruitment panels can work well and can save you us a lot of time and effort, there are a few questions you we should ask before using them:

• Does the panel cover your our region?
  If you we want participants from a particular province, state, or country, we need to check with the vendor to make sure they have adequate numbers in that region. Panels International panels usually do a good job of covering North America and western Europe, but may be patchy elsewhere.
  
  
• Is the panel likely to include the types of people you we want?
  Most commercial recruitment panels consist of consumers. This works well if you’re we’re targeting a portion of the general public, but it’s harder to use consumer panels for other audiences like business people, farmers, government employees, and so on. You We may need to find a more suitable source of participants - see “Other see Other ways to recruit” belowrecruit later in this chapter.
  
  
• Will you we need to do additional screening of your own?
  While the criteria you we supply to the panel will net you us a subset of their members, this may not be specific enough for your our study. For example, you we may have asked the panel for women aged 40-60 who shop online at least once a month, but you’re we’re really only interested in those who have returned at least one item that they bought online.
  Once you we go beyond the criteria that the panel offers, you may find that you we need to do additional screening – see Screening for specific participants later in this chapter.

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