How to Build a Panel

Building a panel is hard work. It takes not just time and money, but commitment, expertise, and honesty. For ACOP, we’ve spent 40 years creating, managing, and perfecting our panel that now serves thousands of clients and hosts millions of panelists across the globe. 

The History of ACOP

The American Consumer Opinion Panel was first created in 1986, before the advent of the internet, online surveys, and digital panels. At the time, it existed as a mail panel. Panelists randomly chosen from phone books from across the country were sent surveys through the mail, with $2 paperclipped to the envelope as an incentive to return the questionnaire. It worked more often than not; thousands of people sent the surveys back and joined the panel. Thus, ACOP was born. 

With the advent of the internet, ACOP moved online. ACOP.com was created in 1995, and all panelists from the original mail panel were sent letters inviting them to join. As the website grew, over 60% of the original mail panel joined ACOP online. A year later, ACOP moved online permanently. Within weeks of launching, 2,000 people a day from all over the world were signing up. At its peak, ACOP.com had over 7,000,000 registered users. For several weeks in 1999, it was one of the top ten most visited websites in the US. 

Today, ACOP is still going strong. The website is translated in 11 different languages across 200 different countries and territories. It has won numerous awards and accreditations, and continues to bring the best to Symmetric’s clients and its own panelists. And, even after all these years, many of those first mail panel respondents are still actively sharing their opinions.   

Building ACOP

When building a survey panel, it’s not enough just to gather members and send them surveys. To truly succeed, you need proper incentives, quality respondents, and intense fraud deterrence. Through a series of homegrown solutions and expert partners, ACOP has managed to meet all three of these goals while also providing high quality research to our clients. 

In the industry, it is standard for panels to be what is called “double opt-in”. This means that, when signing up to join a panel, panelists need only enter their demographic information and verify their email address. However, ACOP takes it a step further with a “triple opt-in” approach. Here, panelists go through the same steps of entering information and email verification, but additionally are later sent an initial screener survey. Bot traps, red herring questions, open ends, and grid questions test the quality of the respondents and help verify their identity, ensuring that the data gathered is from real, honest people. 

On top of that, American Consumer Opinion implements a series of security measures to combat fraud. Symmetric has a dedicated anti-fraud department that reviews open end answers and survey data for quality and honesty. On top of that, we also use a variety of technological solutions. Industry standards like Research Defender, Sentry, and Verisoul are in place to confirm panelists are operating from reliable, secure networks. 

What Makes ACOP Special

ACOP is one of the few traditional survey panels left, setting it apart from other panels in the market research industry. Most panels are side efforts of larger businesses. Conversely, ACOP’s sole purpose is market research. Our panelists get real rewards for real, honest opinions, and have since the panel’s inception.

ACOP is also set apart by the quality of its members. For most other online panels, incentives are low, turnover rate is high, and dishonesty is high as well. The rate of account deletion across other panels averages in at over 10%, while ACOP averages in at a deletion rate of less than 3%. Similarly, ACOP pays panelists $1 for every 5 minutes of their time, while other panels pay around $0.75 for every 10 minutes, or sometimes not at all. Most important is the average tenure of our members. For most panels, members tend to remain members for an average of 90 days. Because of ACOP’s dedication to honesty, trust, and fairness, ACOP members stick around for 3½ years, 14 times the average. 

 

A lot has gone into creating, maintaining, and growing American Consumer Opinion. Looking forward, we will put that same amount of effort and dedication into our panel every year. We do this not just because we want to provide our clients with the quality they deserve, but because we are driven by our mission statement of nearly 40 years: Your Opinion Matters. We want to make sure our members understand how valued they are for giving their opinions and changing the future of products and services across the world, by treating them respectfully and fairly. That’s the kind of panel we’ve built, and it’s the one we’re going to keep building.