ESOMAR 28 Questions

1. What experience does your company have in providing online samples for market research?

Since 2006, ClearVoice Research® has been providing high quality sample to thousands of partners. ClearVoice was founded after the successful development and management of two of the most popular panelist recruitment sites on the web, Survey Club and Survey Scout, which have flourished since their inception in 2004. ClearVoice delivers completed surveys to a diverse cross-section of market research clients. Our success is derived from our commitment to ensuring fast and cost- effective access to consumer and B2B sample through responsive, attentive, and personal service. ClearVoice Research is a technology company that leverages its unique software and recruitment channels to build 100% validated DOI panel allowing us to deliver quality sample. Our development team is able to integrate with partners and we have a host of technology solutions in-house.

2. Please describe and explain the type(s) of online sample sources from which you get respondents. Are these databases? Actively managed research panels? Direct marketing lists? Social networks? Web intercept (also known as river) samples?

The main source of ClearVoice Research’s sample comes from our internally recruited, 100% DOI and telephone or SMS verified panel ClearVoiceSurveys.com and other branded research panels (BusinessDecisionMakers.com; CleaningAdvisoryPanel.com etc…) Our panel is an actively managed, purely market research panel housed in our internal database on our own servers.

ClearVoice has partnerships with Facebook, Amazon.com, LinkedIn and TrialPay to provide high- quality web intercept respondents on an individual project basis. ClearVoice also has the ability to build custom blind or branded panels through targeting recruits and either empaneling them or requiring proof of identity.

ClearVoice Research has the ability to leverage its internal software platforms to handle list management for any client provided sample as well as the ability to open river and router sources upon client request.

3. If you provide samples from more than one source: How are the different sample sources blended together to ensure validity? How can this be replicated over time to provide reliability? How do you deal with the possibility of duplication of respondents across sources?

Validity of sample in projects where we use several sources is ensured through the requirement of proof of identity, ability to re-contact, digital fingerprinting, IP address capture and validation, fraud detection, speed traps, and unique variables assigned to each respondent to ensure that de- duplication occurs prior to data handoff to the client.

4. Are your sample source(s) used solely for market research? If not, what other purposes are they used for?

We are a 100% research only panel.

5. How do you source groups that may be hard-to-reach on the Internet?

ClearVoice Research owns and operates an internal phone room with dialers and recruiters for connecting with hard to reach groups, should that be needed for specific sampling projects.

Our panel is census representative so we have capabilities among nearly all hard to source groups. When we need additional or supplemental niche and international sample, we source these hard-to- reach segments through partnerships with companies that own unique databases of individuals in desirable niches and recruit those members into our panel, typically on a revenue sharing basis with those partners.

Additionally, we are able to leverage our internal polling tool to ask questions ‘on the fly’ all while building longitudinal profiles on our members. This functionality allows us to pre-target respondents based on polling questions which helps us to drive the incidence rate for certain projects up by asking specific term points before the survey launches.

We capture more than 250 data points per panelist on initial registration.

We are always interested in understanding what segments our clients find ‘hard-to-reach’ and will actively pursue panelists in those segments to fill the need if our panel does not have a representative set for that segment.

6. If, on a particular project, you need to supplement your sample(s) with sample(s) from other providers, how do you select those partners? Is it your policy to notify a client in advance when using a third party provider?

We always seek client consent prior to utilizing outside sample providers. All supplementation through outside partners, as well as other sister companies have flash cookies assigned and goes through our IP address location verification to ensure unique survey responses and de-duplication.

7. What steps do you take to achieve a representative sample of the target population?

ClearVoice can achieve inbound or outbound representative balancing. We create quota groups based on client selected demographics and can monitor invitations, starts or completes across these quota groups.

8. Do you employ a survey router?

ClearVoice is in the final stages of testing its custom built survey router. We expect to begin deployment of the survey router to our panelists by August 2014.

9. If you use a router: Please describe the allocation process within your router. How do you decide which surveys might be considered for a respondent? On what priority basis are respondents allocated to surveys?

Once ClearVoice deploys its survey router the allocation process will be based on a propriety code that our developers created to determine which projects are beneficial for our clients in both a financial and duration basis.

10. If you use a router: What measures do you take to guard against, or mitigate, any bias arising from employing a router? How do you measure and report any bias?

Once ClearVoice deploys its survey router, we plan on having hourly reports showing quota ranks to ensure that all of our clients and projects are treated equally inside the router.

11. If you use a router: Who in your company sets the parameters of the router? Is it a dedicated team or individual project managers?

ClearVoice has a dedicated technology team that is based in Jacksonville, Florida that is in charge of setting the parameters of the router and making adjustments on a daily basis. While feedback from project managers will certainly be welcome, ultimately our impartial developers who are not privy to client financial.

12. What profiling data is held on respondents? How is it done? How does this differ across sample sources? How is it kept up-to-date? If no relevant profiling data is held, how are low incidence projects dealt with?

Full demographic and buyer behavior profiles are collected. In addition we also collect profile information on employment, autos, technology and media consumption, gaming, ailments, CPG use, travel & leisure activities, mobile devices, mobile browsing, and mobile operating systems.

Profiles are available for updating to our members at all times. We actively request that members update their profiles when any changes occur in their lives. We also send them a yearly reminder on their birthday to update their profiles.

We leverage the MKTG Inc. research on research profiling survey as a quality scoring mechanism for most of our active panelists.

For Web Intercept respondents we ensure that we are able to verify their identity through our third- party partner and that we have the ability to re-contact them on an as needed basis. In addition, we make best efforts to empanel all Web Intercept respondents.

13. Please describe your survey invitation process. What is the proposition that people are offered to take part in individual surveys? What information about the project itself is given in the process? Apart from direct invitations to specific surveys (or to a router), what other means of invitation to surveys are respondents exposed to? You should note that not all invitations to participate take the form of emails.

Panelists are invited to participate via email invitations. They are told the Survey Length, Reward Offered, Sweepstakes Entry Information and one to two sentence descriptions of the survey they will partake in. In addition to individual survey invites, we have begun testing a Daily Digest for some of our panels where the panelists receive one email a day listing all of the available survey opportunities at that moment. Finally, panelists are able to login to their accounts at any time and view all available surveys on their member dashboards. Here is an example survey:

14. Please describe the incentives that respondents are offered for taking part in your surveys. How does this differ by sample source, by interview length, by respondent characteristics?

On a majority of our panels, our panelists have the opportunity to choose between redeeming their earned cash rewards for Amazon.com gift codes, Dining Dough Gift Certificates or placing the funds on a Payoneer MasterCard Debit Card. Panelists may redeem rewards in $10 increments. For verified doctors and medical professionals on our Physicians Round Table panel, we offer the choice of Swift MasterCard Debit Card or PayPal as the reward option.

Incentive amounts are adjusted based on survey length and target audience. Higher value panelists including IT, B2B, and minorities generally receive a higher incentive to maximize response.

15. What information about a project do you need in order to give an accurate estimate of feasibility using your own resources?

We ask that when clients reach out to us for estimates of feasibility that they provide:  Targeted Demographics  Survey Length  Incidence among targeted demographics  Incidence among general population (if available)  Screening criteria  Time in field  Desired Budget

16. Do you measure respondent satisfaction? Is this information made available to clients?

Part of the validation process for all panelists was to take a brief over-the-phone survey asking them what they liked and disliked about our panel, which competitor survey panels they preferred better, and what we could do to improve. We consistently look at the panelist feedback and implement changes. Inquiries from panelists are responded to within 24 hours.

17. What information do you provide to debrief your client after the project has finished?

If requested, we can provide the following:  Number of deployed email invitations  Average survey completion time  Email invitation click-thru rate  Actual incidence

18. Who is responsible for data quality checks? If it is you, do you have in place procedures to reduce or eliminate undesired within survey behaviors, such as (a) random responding, (b) Illogical or inconsistent responding, (c) overuse of item non-response (e.g. “Don’t Know”) or (d) speeding (too rapid survey completion)? Please describe these procedures.

Data quality is performed by our operations team. We have daily reports which are published and distributed to the team that reflect the new members who have joined in the last 24 hours. These reports provide detailed information on the new member’s registration behavior and if they have completed the SMS validation. New members email addresses are also screened through the BriteVerify protocol to confirm validity. The daily reports also provide information on the new member’s account and demographic profile information to be reviewed for discrepancies and/or potential fraudulent data.

During the profiling process within our router, we present various fraud traps to the responder to validate that their responses are consistent with previous captured data and are not fraudulent.

Once a member is matched to a survey, our systems will:

1) Present Pre-Screening Captcha’s 2) Perform speeder detection checks to determine if a survey has been completed too quickly. 3) When hosting surveys on behalf of our clients, we also program various quality and answer consistency questions to allow us to identify responders who answer illogically or inconsistently.

Finally, we review and validate survey responses. When we are the sample provider and not providing survey programming services, we often receive response feedback from our clients which also helps us determine the quality of answers provided by our users. When evaluating responses we evaluate whether the response is random or not, if the response is inconsistent, or if certain answers have been over used.

Once a member is marked as fraud they are not invited to additional surveys and they are blocked from registering multiple accounts.

We believe our fraud protection is among the best and most sophisticated in the industry. It is a constant battle to stay one step ahead of new technology and the fraudulent and professional survey takers that attempt to corrupt our industry.

19. How often can the same individual be contacted to take part in a survey within a specified period whether they respond to the contact or not? How does this vary across your sample sources?

We do not limit the number of invitations a panelist can receive; however, active panelists receive an average of five survey invitations per month. We keep full records on panelist activity including survey starts, survey completes, rewards earned, rewards cashed out, support tickets and much more. Any respondents that come from Web Intercept sources are given a unique token that follows them throughout their entire survey taking experience with our organization, therefore we are able to keep similar counts on Web Intercept respondents and the amount of surveys they take.

20. How often can the same individual take part in a survey within a specified period? How does this vary across your sample sources? How do you manage this within categories and/or time periods?

Individuals can take part in as many surveys as they qualify for. We are confident in our fraud detection procedures and practices that will flag participants who have completed what appears to be an usually large amount of surveys in a short time period. The system will not allow the panelist to complete any more surveys until a member of the ClearVoice Management or IT Team has a chance to review the account. For Web Intercept traffic, we are able to block individual responders who we have deemed to consistently provide fraudulent responses.

21. Do you maintain individual level data such as recent participation history, date of entry, source, etc., on your survey respondents? Are you able to supply your client with a project analysis of such individual level data?

ClearVoice does maintain a database of individual level data that includes: Invitation Date; Click Date; Project Identification Number; Project Name; Quota Group; Reward Amount; Preliminary Status; Preliminary Reward Amount; Final Status; Final Status Date; Final Reward Amount; and Invitation GUID.

22. Do you have a confirmation of respondent identity procedure? Do you have procedures to detect fraudulent respondents? Please describe these procedures as they are implemented at sample source registration and/or at the point of entry to a survey or router. If you offer B2B samples what are the procedures there, if any?

When a member registers:

1) Identify validation is performed in a number of ways to verify the user’s identity and limit the number of fraudulent accounts. a) SMS Verification - A user cannot start taking surveys or redeem rewards until SMS verified. b) BriteVerify – The solution is used for email address verification. c) eHAWK – This solution analyzes responder data using over 250 tests across a broad spectrum of risk areas, several states of analysis and calculates a variety of risk scores. Those scores are then used to determine whether a responder is fraudulent. Note: Our initial testing of this solution has been completed and implementation is planned in 2Q 2015. 2) We have enabled Regular Captcha on account creation. 3) Restricted IP and Country checks are performed to block common fraud areas and proxy servers. 4) Member location checks have been enabled to check if the user’s location matches their IP. a) This is also done at the point of entry to a survey. 5) Flash Cookies are inserted into the user’s browser during the Registration process, a) Inserts the Flash Cookie and checks for multiple Flash Cookies by org. b) If the Flash Cookie count is greater than the configured number, then the member is marked as fraud. c) We also check if there is already a Flash Cookie stored for the member with the same value. If one does not exist we insert the new one. d) Flash Cookies are also inserted when the user logs in and also at the point of entry to a survey. e) On every survey start we capture 17 different pieces of information about the person’s computer. f) Flash cookies are much harder to delete than regular cookies. It requires a high level of technical expertise to delete a flash cookie. 6) Our operations center will also call new members to randomly validate their information, particularly if the registration data provided looks suspicious or potential fraudulent.

Our systems are built on a highly sophisticated and secure .NET platform, and our servers are housed in a secure data center. Our additional Fraud Detection Procedures Include:

1) Speeder detection is enabled to check if a survey has been completed too quickly. 2) Pre-Screening Captcha’s. 3) Fraud traps are built into our profiling questions. 4) Fingerprint logs track resourceful browser and version information. 5) Fraud, Error and IP logs and tracks user’s strange behavior, and logs every member’s login

Once a member is marked as fraud they are excluded from additional surveys invitations and they are blocked from registering multiple accounts.

23. Please describe the opt-in process.

Our initial registration form collects basic information including: Name, Email Address, Postal Address, Gender, DOB, and Language. After completing this form a double opt-in/confirmation email is sent to the email address. Only double opt-in/confirmed accounts are invited to participate in surveys. Following opt-in, panelists are asked to validate their accounts via SMS or live in-person phone call prior to being allowed to redeem any earned rewards. Throughout the panelist life-cycle we ask our panelists to complete and update their profile so that we collect as many relevant data points as possible.

24. Please provide a link to your Privacy Policy. How is your Privacy Policy provided to your respondents?

Here is the link to our privacy policy: http://www.clearvoicesurveys.com/Privacy.aspx Panelists are provided access to the Privacy Policy via the homepage of our panel pages and on all of the pages inside of a panelist’s dashboard.

25. Please describe the measures you take to ensure data protection and data security.

As we do not host all surveys sent to our panelists, we do have pre and post survey validation, security, de-duplication and speeder detection. For those surveys we host, we employ techniques to identify fraud from speeding, inattention, conjoint and open ended responses. For those we do not host, we work closely with all clients and immediately remove any panelist determined to be a cheat or in-attentive with a zero-tolerance policy.

26. What practices do you follow to decide whether online research should be used to present commercially sensitive client data or materials to survey respondents?

ClearVoice examines projects for any personal, sensitive, or illegal questions being asked before it is sent to panelists. Project managers test survey links and backup support is provided by in-house auxiliary staff to help project managers quickly and efficiently root out any issues with a survey.

27. Are you certified to any specific quality system? If so, which one(s)?

We have a quality tracking program with MKTG Inc. In fact, ClearVoice Research received Sample Source Auditors first ever Real ID consistency Audit Certificate after being subjected to the largest blind consistency audit in market research history. Our clients benefit from the peace of mind that comes with knowing our panel delivers results that are consistent and reliable

28. Do you conduct online surveys with children and young people? If so, do you adhere to the standards that ESOMAR provides? What other rules or standards, for example COPPA in the United States, do you comply with?

Yes, we invite young people (age 13 and above) to participate in surveys and children (age 12 and under) to participate in surveys through their parents. We accept registrations of survey panelists that are 13 years of age or older in compliance with COPPA. We adhere to the standards of ESOMAR for those children under the age of 13.