If you launched your study but experience slow data collection this could be due to the following reasons: 

Low Participant Payment

On Connect, we have a baseline pay of $10/hour. The site minimum is $7.50/hour but the higher the pay the more likely participants will take your study. If you would like to change the pay of a study once launching, please pause the current study and then reach out to us at connect-support@cloudresearch.com so we can close it. You will be automatically refunded to your account balance for any participants you do not receive. You can then clone the study and make updates to the participant payment and any other settings. 

Low Time Estimation

The time estimation is set by the researcher during study set up. If you see that participants are taking longer than this to complete the survey, and the pay is in-line with your time estimation and not with the average/median completion times from participants, you can pause the study and clone it with the updated pay and estimated completion time. Then, reach out to us at connect-support@cloudresearch.com so we can close it for you to be refunded back to your account balance for any participants you do not receive. 

*Our system will automatically pause your study if the estimated completion time is much less than the average/median times it is taking participants to complete your survey. You can read more about this here.

Targeted Demographics

If you have a lot of demographic targeting in addition to quotas that is restricting the number of participants qualified to take your study this can lead to slow data collection. It is possible your demographics are too specific. 

Please reach out to us at connect-support@cloudresearch.com for advice and to see if another one of our platforms or services will work better for you. 

Quotas

Feasibility for quota breakdowns may be low for harder to reach categories (ex: ages 60+). During set up of the study, we allow you to select our relax quotas feature which will allow the system to automatically relax the quotas once 24 hours of slow data collection occurs. Please reach out to us at connect-support@cloudresearch.com for us to check if the quotas have been relaxed or to relax them for you if you did not select this option during set up.

What Happens When the Quotas are Relaxed?

Relaxing quotas allows for more participants to qualify for your study. For example, if you selected to target age, gender, race, and ethnicity (4 quota categories), but still have not filled up the quota for participants ages 60+, we can relax the quotas so the system will send you participants who meet 3 out of 4 of the quota categories. This will lead to over-recruitment in the easier to reach demographics. 

Incorrect Study Set Up

Our completion methods are to ensure participants who make it to the end of your survey are able to submit in order to count towards the study's completion. It is possible that you programmed the survey incorrectly which is not allowing participants to see the code you set the study to have or be automatically redirected back to Connect at the end. Additionally, you could've forgotten to publish the full survey so when they click on the study to enter the survey, they are not able to complete it. This would explain why very few participants are submitting the study and there is a high bounce rate. We recommend previewing your survey before launching to ensure everything is working properly.

If you are unable to figure out what may be causing the slow data collection, please reach out to us at connect-support@cloudresearch.com and we'd be happy to help!