How to use quota management in surveys?

As a dedicated data collector, you've meticulously crafted the perfect survey to gather valuable insights from your target audience. Each question is designed to capture meaningful responses, and you're eager to analyze the data to uncover trends and patterns. However, without proper quota management, your efforts could quickly become chaotic.

For example, imagine you're working with a panel provider to conduct a market research survey on consumer preferences for a new fitness app. You want to ensure responses come from a balanced mix of age groups and genders. Without quota management, you might receive 70% of responses from young adults aged 18-24 and only 30% from other age groups, with an over-representation of female respondents. This imbalance skews your data, making it difficult to draw accurate conclusions about overall consumer preferences. To tackle this imbalance, BlockSurvey brings you the "Quota Management" feature.

Quota management controls the number of responses to ensure balanced and representative data.

Why is it important in surveys and forms?

• Avoiding Bias: Without quotas, there's a risk of bias in the data collected, which can skew results and lead to inaccurate interpretations. Quotas help in minimizing such biases by systematically ensuring diversity in responses.
• Control Over Sample Size: Quotas help in controlling the number of responses from different groups within your target population. This prevents oversampling of one group and ensures adequate representation from all relevant segments.
• Representativeness: It ensures that the responses collected accurately reflect the demographics or characteristics of the population you're studying. By setting quotas based on demographic factors (age, gender, location, etc.), you can ensure your sample is representative.
• Accuracy of Insights: By managing quotas, you can gather a balanced and diverse set of responses, which improves the accuracy of the insights and conclusions drawn from the survey or form data.

How to set up Quota management in BlockSurvey?

BlockSurvey provides two types of quota management options depending on your needs:

1. Overall Quota: This quota is set at the survey level. It limits the total number of completed responses for the entire survey.
2. Logic Quota: This allows you to collect responses from a specific subset of respondents based on defined logic conditions.

Setup Overall Quota

1. Go to Settings -> Quota Management in your survey.
2. Click on Add Quota and select Overall Quota.
3. Name the quota and enter the maximum number of responses you want to collect for the entire survey.
4. Choose the action to be taken once the limit is reached:
   • End Response Collection: No more responses will be collected once the limit is reached.
   • Continue Response Collection: New responses will still be collected after reaching the limit, but these responses will be saved under Disqualified Responses on the Responses screen.
5. Customize End of Survey Collection:
   • Redirect to a Thank You screen.
   • Display a default message.
   • Display a custom message (e.g., "Thank you for participating!").
   • Redirect to a URL (e.g., your website).

Note: The Overall Quota can only be set once per survey.

Setup Logic Quota

Let's set up the Logic quota with an example: You are conducting a market research survey and want to ensure you get responses from an equal number of male and female participants. You want to limit the total number of responses to 200, with 100 responses from each gender. Here's how you can set up the logic quota:

1. Go to Settings -> Quota Management in your survey.
2. Click on "Add Quota" and select "Logic Quota".
3. Name the quota "Gender Quota". Set the maximum number of responses to 200.
4. By default, the "Set percentage for quota" option is enabled.
5. Click on "Add Quota Logic" to define your logic conditions.
• Define quota logic for male and female respondents by adding separate Conditional groups in the same Logic Quota.



6. If you know the exact count, you can disable the "Set percentage for quota" option define a quota logic, and set the desired count.



7. Choose the action to be taken once the limit is reached:
   • End Response Collection: Stop collecting responses once the response limit is reached.
   • Continue Response Collection: Continue collecting responses but categorize them under "Disqualified Responses".
8. Customize End of Survey Collection:
   • Redirect to a Thank You screen.
   • Display a default message.
   • Display a custom message (e.g., "Thank you for participating!").
   • Redirect to a URL (e.g., your website).

Quota Management vs. Screen-out Management

1. Purpose and Application:

• Quota Management is designed to ensure that the survey collects a balanced and representative set of responses according to predefined quotas. It’s used to control the number of responses from specific demographic groups (such as age, gender, or location) to prevent over-representation of any group.
• Screen-out Management is employed to filter out respondents who do not meet specific criteria based on their answers to screening questions. It ensures that only respondents who are relevant to the survey topic proceed, enhancing the accuracy and relevance of the collected data.

2. How It Works:

• Quota Management: Works by setting limits (quotas) on the number of responses that can be collected from specific groups. Once a quota is filled, no more responses are accepted from that group, ensuring balanced data representation.
• Screen-out Management: Operates by setting conditions based on the responses to screening questions. Respondents who do not meet these conditions are screened out and prevented from continuing with the survey.

3. Focus on Respondent Qualification:

• Quota Management: Focuses on ensuring a balanced distribution of responses among predefined groups but does not filter out respondents based on specific answers.
• Screen-out Management: Focuses on qualifying respondents based on their answers to screening questions, ensuring that only those who meet the necessary criteria complete the survey.

4. Outcome:

• Quota Management: Controls the quantity and distribution of responses, ensuring that each segment of your target population is adequately represented.
• Screen-out Management: Filters out irrelevant respondents early in the survey, ensuring that the data collected is relevant and from the target audience.

What are some use cases for Quota management?

Here are some unique use cases that highlight its importance:

• Market Research: In market research, it's crucial to gather insights from a diverse audience to understand different consumer behaviors and preferences. Quota management ensures responses from various demographic groups, providing a comprehensive view of the market.
• Product Feedback Surveys: Imagine you're collecting feedback on a new software product. Quota management allows you to ensure that you hear from both novice and experienced users in equal measure. This balanced approach helps in understanding different user perspectives and ensures that your product improvements are comprehensive.
• Customer Satisfaction: In a customer satisfaction survey, quota management can be used to ensure that feedback comes from customers across various regions and demographics. This helps in identifying region-specific issues or strengths and ensures that corporate decisions are informed by a representative sample of their global customer base.
• Election Polling: Polling agencies use quota management to ensure that their samples accurately represent the voting demographics of different regions, age groups, and socio-economic backgrounds. This approach minimizes biases and provides reliable insights into voter preferences.
• Employee Engagement Surveys: Quota management is essential in employee engagement surveys to ensure that feedback is collected from employees at all levels of the organization, across departments and roles. This helps in identifying department-specific concerns or strengths and crafting targeted improvement strategies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, with BlockSurvey's quota management feature, you can elevate the quality and reliability of your survey data. Quota management provides a powerful way to ensure balanced and representative responses, minimizing biases and enhancing the accuracy of your insights. By effectively managing response quotas, you can gather meaningful feedback from diverse segments of your audience. This ensures your surveys reflect the true diversity of your target population, leading to more informed and actionable decisions. So, if you're looking to optimize your response management process and obtain high-quality data, explore the quota management feature in BlockSurvey and take your data collection to the next level.