Sara Baiocco Researcher, CEPS

We were concerned about the capacity to reach out enough respondents for a survey we are running on adult learning in micro and small enterprises in seven EU countries and thus we thought that a professional survey company had the right competences to design and disseminate a survey to ensure high response rate.

The design of the survey as well as the dissemination strategy was developed thanks to the insights of Toponderzoek based on their previous experience and the response rate was actually higher than expected.

High costs of a professional survey company as well as concerns about the control over data resulting from the survey. Lack of control on the dissemination was also a concern. However, none of these proved to be a problem in our collaboration. Indeed, the dataset of the responses was provided in a high quality format and minimum efforts were required to made it usable for analysis.

The high availability of the staff to respond to our concerns and needs and the limited cost. We also liked the example of survey that the company provided. We also appreciated that this survey was also in the field of policy making, proving past experience of the company with this type of surveys.

We successfully completed the survey exceeding the target number of responses. In fact, we doubled the expected number of responses to the survey. This provided a rich source of evidence for our study on adult learning in micro and small enterprises in the EU, though not representative, but this was not required.