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Question about recruiting without incentives from the ResearchOps Community
Look, I know people are worried about the economy. Businesses everywhere are slashing their budgets. More than 140,000 employees have been laid off in 2022 alone. I get it—people are strapped for cash and looking for scrappy solutions to save money on research. But cutting out incentives isn’t it.
Before this recruiting-without-incentives nonsense goes any further, let’s talk about:
Why incentives are non-negotiable for UX research
How to incentivize participants on a shoestring budget
🙅♀️ Why incentives are non-negotiable for UX research
In the wake of layoffs and budget cuts across industries, researchers (and stakeholders in charge of research budgets) may be left wondering: “Can I, should I, and how do I recruit research participants without incentives?”
The answer to that is: you can’t, you shouldn’t, and you don’t.
Incentives are essential because they…
Improve response rates
Limit no-shows
Reduce bias (when used correctly)
Attract the right audience
Create trust
Enforce equity
Are simply good (and standard) practice
7 reasons UX research incentives are non-negotiable
1. Improve response rates
The first and maybe the most practical reason for offering incentives is that they improve response rates to your study invites.
“Our meta-analysis demonstrated statistically significant increases in the rate of consent and responses from participants when offered even small monetary value incentives. These findings suggest that incentives may be used to reduce the rate of recruitment failure and subsequent study termination.”
2. Limit no-shows
Along with increasing the likelihood that people will apply to your study, incentives also improve the rates of participants actually following through with your study.
User Interviews’s own research about incentives supports this, showing a decline in no-show rates as incentive amounts increase. The data we pulled for this study looked at only closed (successfully recruited and completed) studies—of which there were very few offering no incentives.
No-show rate by incentive amount for remote moderated studies with B2C participants—note the decline in no-show rates (blue line) as incentive amounts (green bars) increase.
No-show rate by incentive amount for moderated in-person studies with B2C participants. Although no-show rates are higher for in-person studies overall (likely due to the higher commitment required for in-person sessions), you can see a similar decline in no-show rates as the incentive amount increases, starting around the $110 mark. Also, there’s no data for in-person studies that didn’t offer incentives—that’s because we only looked at closed (recruited and completed) studies, and we don’t typically see in-person studies closed successfully without offering an incentive.
In other words: Good luck filling your study without a fair incentive, or any incentive at all. Participants simply don’t apply as often and rarely follow through with studies that don’t offer some kind of incentive, whether monetary or non-monetary incentives like swag or product discounts.
3. Reduce bias (when used correctly)
If you’re worried about incentives causing bias or altering participant behavior to the extent that it skews your data, you’re not alone.
Like Michele says in her post, incentives don’t typically cause bias—as long as you’re using them correctly and following the right protocols for recruitment, study moderation, and analysis.
In fact, eliminating incentives can actually increase bias. If you don’t pay participants for their time, you’re only going to attract people who feel like their feedback is important enough to share (e.g. people on the extremes, who love or hate your company enough that they want to tell you).
“The best researchers that we've talked to have been adamant that you absolutely have to use incentives. One, of course, it elicits more participation, but free surveys, it's so biased, the data that you get. You are only getting responses from people who are willing to do this for free. You are going to see a drastic difference between the quality of data that you get when you use incentives and when you don't use incentives.”
4. Attract the right audience
We’ve established that you can reduce bias by offering incentives, period. Also, the type of incentive you offer can help you attract your target audience.
“We found that a lottery reward attracted participants who held stronger openness-to-change values while a charity reward attracted those with stronger self-transcendence orientation. Further, we found that participation self-selection resulted in differences in the task outcomes. Through attracting more self-directed individuals, the lottery reward resulted in more ideas generated in a brainstorming task. Design implications include utilizing rewards to target desired participants and using diverse incentives to improve participation diversity.”
If you’re genuinely worried about introducing bias or attracting the wrong audience, think creatively about alternative incentive types and different ways to frame them. What incentive types would be most attractive to the audience you’re looking for? How can you present those incentives in a way that supports the best outcomes for your study?
Incentives are supposed to work for you, not against you—but, of course, you have to be willing to offer them in the first place.
5. Create trust
When someone participates in a study, they’re giving you the gift of their time. Incentives are your way of saying thank you, demonstrating that you value the gift they’ve given you, and assuring them that you’re going to use that gift in a way that’s safe and respectful.
Why would participants trust an organization that doesn’t seem to value them (or their time) as individuals?
Common concerns or trust blockers for participants include:
Lack of interest
Inability to make extended time commitments
Concerns about personal privacy
Financial barriers
These concerns (and others) can be overcome with fair incentives: a simple thank-you for their valuable time, attention, and data.
Not everyone has the privilege of carving time out of their day to talk to you.
Whether they’re stay-at-home moms, surgical residents, Fedex delivery drivers, SaaS marketing leaders, or airplane mechanics, people may not be able or willing to make the financial sacrifices required to participate in your study—such as taking time off work or paying for public transportation.
Non-incentivized studies tend to only attract people who can afford to make those sacrifices, creating an equity gap in your audience.
By offering reasonable incentives, you enable low-income folks to participate in research, too, leading to a more diverse participant panel and holistic, unbiased insights.
7. Are simply good (and standard) practice
Researchers have been paying participants for over a century. 💯
Incentives are almost universal in UX research, market research, and academic research alike (with some special exceptions, such as government workers who aren’t allowed to accept them).
So… read the room, folks. Millions of intelligent, credentialed researchers must be paying incentives for a reason, right?
💸 How to incentivize participants on a shoestring budget
You can’t cheap out on incentives.
However, most UX researchers obviously aren’t in a position to offer uber-expensive incentives and generous perks for participating in studies.
If your budget’s recently been cut or was never that great to begin with, here’s how to continue doing UX research, the right (and affordable) way:
Get crystal clear about your recruitment audience for efficient, effective targeting.
Reduce overall research costs with the right tools and processes.
Do fewer, more focused studies and pay the same incentive.
Make sure you’re not overpaying unnecessarily.
Provide alternative incentives that don’t cost you extra.
Know (and demonstrate) the impact of user research to make the case for a higher budget.
💡 Pro tip: When possible (and applicable), recruit from dedicated customer panels or customer advisory boards to speed up the process. Building an internal participant panel can be especially useful for researchers who need to target niche, hard-to-reach audiences.
2. Reduce overall research costs with the right tools and processes.
All too often, researchers are left to handle incentives payouts themselves, sending gift cards manually via post or email, keeping track of who’s received what in an Excel spreadsheet, and dedicating hours of focus and energy toward one of the most easily-automated tasks in the UX research process.
There are plenty of tools in the marketplace for streamlining incentives distribution, including:
User Interviews (that’s us!): the top-rated panel management and recruitment automation solution for teams that do research at scale. Learn more about how we distribute incentives, including the types of incentives we offer, the currencies we support, and more.
Tremendous: A painless payouts management platform with support for 800+ global redemption options like prepaid cards, gift cards, direct bank transfers, and charity donations.
Giftbit: A rewards platform that lets you buy, deliver, and control digital gift cards via email, text, or in-app.
Tangocard: A Rewards-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform, managing brand approvals, legal agreements, inventory, sending, and tracking of digital gift cards.
BHN Rewards (formerly Rybbon): A digital rewards management platform from Blackhawk Network, the global leader in branded payment solutions.
🧙♀️ Explore these and other purpose-built tools in the UX research armory in the 2022 UX Research Tools Map.
3. Do fewer, more focused studies and pay the same incentive.
The “fairness” of a research incentive doesn’t expand or contract to fit your budget.
If you can’t afford to fairly pay 10 participants for their time, consider whether you’re able to run the study with 5 participants instead.
“In my opinion, sometimes you really only need to talk to one person. I think people might fall into problems with qualitative research where they try to turn it into quantitative research. They try to say things like, oh, most of the people I talked to like this or seven out of eight really thought this person was better than this version.
That's not really what qualitative research is for. That's what quantitative research is for.”
Also ask yourself: Do I even need to talk to participants in the first place? You might find the answers you’re looking for:
You might not need as much budget for incentives as you think you do.
In fact, our 2022 Research Incentives report, based on data from nearly 20,000 projects completed with User Interviews in the past year, found that most studies required a minimum incentive amount to get people in the door.
By looking at the most common, second most common, and average amounts offered, we were able to identify a market rate range for attracting qualified applicants for different study types:
Summary of incentive market rates for moderated B2B and B2C studies
Incentive market rates for unmoderated B2B and B2C studies by study length
Depending on what you’re studying and the audience you’re trying to reach, it’s rare that you’ll have to pay above these ranges for a successful recruit.
Along with saving you money, it’s also worth noting that overpaying can theoretically become a form of coercion which can interfere with your study’s results and ethics. For example, an outsized incentive might encourage a reluctant participant (or one who’s only in it for the payout) to agree to a high-risk study that they wouldn’t have otherwise felt comfortable with.
“We must also consider the quality of information received from an unwilling participant whose only motivation is the incentive and not the desire to give their perspective on an issue or feedback to improve a program. In this scenario, offering an incentive may be ethical, but could jeopardize the results of the study. This is why we aim to provide incentives that are appropriate for overcoming hesitation and not acting as a large gain.”
5. Provide alternative incentives that don’t cost you extra.
Even if you're user testing with your mom, you owe her a nice cup of coffee or an extra long phone call. Compensation doesn't have to be cash but it does have to be valued by the participant—and not all participants are equally motivated by cash-based incentives.
Consider other, non-monetary types of compensation you can offer participants, such as:
Company swag
Access to beta features
Product discounts
Lottery-style rewards
If you’re able, you may find the best results by allowing participants to choose from a variety of different types of incentives, as Nick Baum of Tremendous suggested on Awkward Silences:
“The best solution, really, is to turn on an entire catalog for your recipients, give them as much optionality as possible.”
Some participants might prefer lower-cost incentives like company swag or access to beta features, saving you money in the long run. It’s a win-win.
6. Know (and demonstrate) the impact of user research to make the case for a higher budget.
UX research can impact product and business decisions that save time, effort, and cost. It can lead to higher revenue, more loyal customers, and competitive market advantages.
If your research is successful, these payoffs typically exceed the costs of research. If you can track, measure, and clearly demonstrate this value to your stakeholders, then you’ll have a much easier time advocating for an increased budget to support fair incentives.
TL;DR—you have to pay people for their time. Yes, that’s an extra cost to your research practice, but that cost is ultimately made up for with higher-quality participants from a more diverse pool of applicants, faster time-to-match with those participants, and more accurate data.
But incentives don’t need to be an added time-cost as well.
User Interviews is the fastest and easiest way to recruit (and incentivize) quality participants for research. Get insights from any niche within our pool of over 2 million participants through Recruit or build and manage your own panel with Research Hub, the first CRM designed for researchers.
Our tools simplify all of the most tedious and time-consuming aspects of research recruiting, from sending study invites to distributing incentives after the study is completed.
Marketer, writer, poet. Lizzy likes hiking, people-watching, thrift shopping, learning and sharing ideas. Her happiest memory is sitting on the shore of Lake Champlain in the summer of 2020, eating a clementine.
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