As an omnibus survey company, we know a thing or two about running effective and cost-efficient online surveys. Omnibus surveys are an excellent way to get answers fast for your product, service, brand, or organization.
They are typically short 1 to 10 question surveys sent to a general population audience in the U.S. to obtain feedback fast. Omnibus survey companies like Drive Research run survey cycles on a regular basis.
If you have a more niche audience (i.e., Millennials), we can put together a customer omnibus quote for you since the audiences differ from our standard general population audience.
The survey often includes your organization’s questions on top of other organizations who bought questions on the same cycle. Because the costs of the survey are shared, the omnibus survey is more cost-effective than a stand-alone survey.
Although you are never visible to the other questions asked in the survey, you do receive all of the data for your questions. It can also include a number of demographic questions for cross-tabulations.
How does the process work with an omnibus survey company?
The first of ten steps is to reach out to our team at [email protected] or by calling 888-725-DATA. You will be put in contact with the appropriate team member to help find a solution for you and answer any questions you might have.
Following the call, our omnibus survey company will walk you through the following step-by-step process from starting the project through completion.
Step 1: Proposal
After our omnibus survey company learns a little more about your objectives and needs, we’ll put together a mini-proposal that highlights your package. Our omnibus survey packages vary by the number of questions and the number of responses (i.e., 400, 1000, or 2000 survey completes).
Once this agreement page is signed and returned, we’re off and running. We are happy to share an NDA to be signed, or use an NDA you have in-place with legal to ensure the results remain confidential.
Step 2: Kickoff
Once the agreement page is signed and returned, our team can hold a quick kickoff meeting with your brand. In the interest of time, sometimes, this kickoff meeting is skipped.
Many of our clients have the survey questions and objectives already outlined. In those cases, it is sent to us directly to get started quickly.
If not, have no fear. Our team will explore your needs to understand and recommend what questions to ask U.S. adults. We ask about what you want to learn from the research, and how would you like to use the results? It helps us construct the appropriate survey questions.
Step 3: Survey Design
Regardless of whether you drafted the survey questions or not, we will run a complete audit of the questionnaire. It will include suggestions on how to ask questions, what type of question to ask (multiple choice, grid, etc.), how to randomize the sequence, etc.
All of this value-added information is something our team builds into each and every project at our national omnibus survey company. Once we complete our audit, our team will send you a revised draft for approval before moving to the next step.
Step 4: Programming
Once your team is satisfied with the survey questions, our team moves on to programming. It involves our analysts taking the questions and adding them to our survey software.
Survey programming items include:
- Question text
- Answer categories
- Marking questions as must-answer
- Including other(s)
- Adding routing or skip patterns
- Adding answer category sequence (randomize, alphabetical, etc.)
We offer a total of 36 question types for your omnibus survey.
Step 5: Choice of Demographics
Our omnibus survey company has many demographic data points on our national panel. These are not questions you need to ask as part of your question package, as they can be appended to your results.
Demographic question options to add include:
- Age
- Gender
- Household income
- Number of people in the household
- Children in the household
- Ethnicity
- Education
There are many more demographic questions to include, but it is important to choose wisely! Our team can recommend the best demographic questions to include based on your objectives.
Step 6: Testing
Once our analyst programs the survey, our omnibus survey firm team runs extensive in-house testing of the questionnaire. It typically includes circulating the link to 4 or 5 testers on the Drive Research team.
As part of this testing link, comments may be left by testers on the online survey. Comments might include items or issues identified with skip patterns, grammar, spelling, sequence, etc. It is to ensure everything is caught before launching to a national audience.
Step 7: Soft-launch
Now the survey is ready to field. Our next step is to field the survey to a small number of people nationally. We review the feedback carefully to ensure the process is working correctly, and there are no issues.
Step 8: Full Launch
After the soft-launch, the survey is fully employed. Results are census representative on all key demographics among U.S. adults. Depending on the package you select, it might include 400 responses, 1000 responses, or 2000 responses. Fieldwork can move as quickly as 24 to 48 hours or less.
Step 9: Online Portal
Once the full launch starts, Drive Research shares an online dashboard of live results with your team. Here is an example of the overall results (full sample) and an example of what the cross-tabulation reports may look like (i.e., breaking data down by age, region, etc.).
These reports provide a sneak peek and insider view of the final results. The portal is passcode protected and interactive, which allows clicking around to view comments, filter by date, and other functionality.
Our online portal allows you to export results in Excel, PDF, Powerpoint, or Word documents. You can select from demographic cross-tabs or cross-tab based on custom questions asked in the survey.
Step 10: Wrap-up
Drive Research runs final quality checks on the data. It includes auditing time-to-complete, open-ended text responses, red herrings, and other measures put in place.
The team follows-up with your brand to answer any questions, assist with interpretation, or aid in exporting the results.
There are also additional layers of analysis and reporting our team can provide once fieldwork is complete. These optional packages include:
- Topline report: a 3-to-4 page executive summary of key findings to help recap takeaways.
- Comprehensive report: a 100+ page report with a summary, recommendations, and full appendix.
- Infographic: a graphical display of the data with icons and graphics as a separate deliverable.
- Blog posts: our team creates a series of articles highlighting a wide range of findings.
- Social snippets: our omnibus survey company creates a series of 20 social images with key findings.
- Whitepaper: a 4-page piece of collateral to place on your website to encourage form fills for download.
- Website copy: our team will pull and consulate with your web team to add SEO-friendly content.
3 Advantages to an Omnibus Survey
Although there are many advantages to working with an omnibus survey company, there are three that emerge to the top of the list.
1. Turnaround time
We walked through our detailed 10-step process for omnibus surveys. Perhaps the greatest benefit of all is the ability to get insights quickly. In many cases, results can be turned around within 24 to 48 hours depending on the scope and the number of questions.
If you need data or insights today, omnibus surveys provide answers tomorrow. It’s really that simple. The turnaround time is hard to match for more custom survey projects.
2. Cost savings
Because the survey is fielded with several organizations on each cycle, there are inherent cost savings through sharing a survey launch.
Although you have no visibility of other questions being asked by other brands in the omnibus, it’s easier for Drive Research to send 1 survey and have respondents answer 25 questions at once, than to send 10 separate surveys of 5 questions each.
It’s economies of scale, and those savings are passed to you.
3. Instant access to results
One of the pain points with a large custom surrey project is waiting a week or two to receive a full report. With our omnibus surveys, a portal is provided immediately after we go live into fieldwork.
You can review up-to-the-second results through tabulated charts and graphs. It’s instant access and allows your team to interpret the results and take immediate action.
Contact Our National Omnibus Survey Company
Are you interested in working with our omnibus survey firm? Contact us for a rate sheet or custom proposal for your online survey. We will consult with you from end-to-end to give you exactly what you need for your market research project. Contact us through one of the four options below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected] (we'll respond quickly)
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040