Clients

Cunningham Research Group

The Cunningham Research Group (CRG) is an independent market research agency, a supplier of consumer data collection services across the USA. It carries out a variety of market research activities including face-to-face, telephone and online research methods. It is a privately owned company with about 900 employees at over 40 locations in USA.

CRG made the decision to start up an online panel in 2004 and then launched its www.datatelligence.com research panel in early 2005. Now nine months in, this panel consists of 250,000 names and is growing at a rate of 20,000 names per week. The final aim is to have a panel of several million names that rivals some of the large US-based panels. This will place CRG as a leader in the US online panel market.

During the design stage of the panel CRG identified a need for good panel management software that allowed them to select sample easily for research projects and gave access for panellists to view and maintain their information online. They also required a good information flow between a panel management system and the MI Pro interviewing system that they already had in place.

The MARSC Solution

CRG chose MARSC as a sampling and panel management tool for their new online panel. It provided them with a specialist sampling tool, and a web portal to give access to panellists. They also gained the ability to receive outcome codes instantly back from the MI Pro interviewing system to keep the database completely up to date at all times.

The implementation of MARSC went quickly and smoothly even taking into account interfacing between the systems, and the whole process was completed in a few weeks. The online research team felt the benefits almost immediately with new panellists being signed up on the web site, and using the sampling tool for extraction of data for each project. MARSC’s user interface also made the process of defining a sample by complex demographic criteria an easy and non-technical task.

Two to three new surveys are started every week, and this activity is expected to increase with the overall growth of both the panel and sales of panel-based research. The ease of defining and issuing sample is an essential factor in an increasingly busy team.

CRG is a technology led company, so the team particularly liked the open architecture of the MARSC SQL Server database. MARSC software allowed the company to integrate their proprietary automated online recruitment to be used within their 40 community panels called Townsquare to schedule online interviews. This allows community panellists to receive invitations to participate in one-on-ones, focus groups, or session tests while still allowing CRG to manage respondents with the panel management features.

Also the flexibility of the web components allowed them to customise the web portal to their needs. The good database design means that as the panel grows, and more CRG research is done online, the MARSC database will be able to expand with it. Though originally MARSC was bought for online research, the sampling tool is being used for other research as well, and much of the sampling for CRG’s CATI research is now being done with MARSC.

What effect has MARSC had?

The online panel team agree that without MARSC it would be just too difficult to do the necessary amount of sampling within their team and therefore the whole online research panel operation would have been much less efficient. Also the web portal would have taken considerable time to develop in-house and even then there still would be the issue of real-time data flow between the web portal, sampling tool and interviewing system. MARSC handles all this for them allowing them to concentrate on other areas of running the panel.

"Our online research division is growing rapidly and MARSC is an essential tool for the efficiency and success of this operation."
Paul Cunningham - President Cunningham Research Group