Clients

Toluna

Based in Dallas, Texas, independent research agency Common Knowledge Research Services (now part of Toluna) have been running their Your2Cents Online Opinion Panel since 1997. This panel now offers over 500 target selects (data fields) for over a million profiled households and businesses with several thousand new panellists joining every day. As well as offering highly targeted consumer and b2b panels, Common Knowledge offers access to specialized Consumer Healthcare, Teen, Technology Professionals and Mobile respondent panels.

Common Knowledge had already built their own systems to offer superior panel management and surveying capabilities as well as email management and incentive reward systems. The continued growth of both the panel and client needs meant that the manual process for drawing sample using SQL queries was putting a strain on the IT department’s resources, and a solution to automate this process was required.

While they were originally intending to build a sampling system themselves Common Knowledge discovered that MARSC could offer the complex sampling capability that they required.

The solution

Because Common Knowledge uses a variety of bespoke custom systems, the decision to implement MARSC focussed on Centurion’s knowledge of integrating MARSC with other systems. Also there were a number of specific processes needed and it was important that Centurion should be able to tailor the solution to Common Knowledge’s exact requirements.

In the run up to the installation Centurion listened to and understood Common Knowledge’s requirements and working methodology. In doing so they were able to offer a cost effective licensing model that would allow the research project managers access to the system to define the sample frames within MARSC and then pass these over to the database team for sample processing.

By working together in this period Centurion was able to provide the specific functionality required by Common Knowledge. When the time came for installation the majority of the work had already been completed to allow for the transfer of the large amount of panellist data into a MARSC database. This allowed system implementation to be successfully completed and cleared to go live on time and on budget.

Whilst on site Centurion provided full user and technical training to the core database team who were subsequently able to design and provide user training to the larger group of project managers.

The benefits

MARSC has automated the sampling process and this has delivered significant time savings in project delivery. Project managers have found the system easy to use and, coupled with the ability to use saved sample templates when building sample frames, the sampling turnaround time has been significantly reduced. This in turn has led to a reduction in the time that the database team have to dedicate to this process. And whilst MARSC is handling up to 98% of the sampling work the open architecture of its SQL database has meant that the database team can still handle any bespoke sampling requirements outside MARSC if necessary.

MARSC is designed to cope with the demands of large database sampling and Common Knowledge is confident that this will allow for continued panel growth and the increased demands placed upon the system in the future.

"MARSC has helped us to significantly increase the efficiency of our sampling"
Shirley Morgan
Senior Database Administrator - Toluna