Successful San Diego-based pollster Raul Furlong tells us how automated phone polling works well for his clients. If you’ve heard the voice of radio/TV legend Clark Anthony asking your views on politics, it was likely Raul’s firm Datamar calling you.
[Last month John Neinstedt of San Diego’s Competitive Edge firm made the case for ‘live’ surveys (a real-time interviewer asking questions]. http://sdrostra.com/?p=10607 SD Rostra thanks both Raul Furlong and John Neinstedt for educating us about recent advances in the vital field of measuring public opinion. ___________________________________________________________________________________……..Polling In The Twenty-First Century
by Raul Furlong
As we begin a new political season we have an opportunity to review the state of political polling in the nation as we enter the second decade of the 21st century. http://www.datamar.net/
The new century has brought us advances in technology such as VOIP, IVR, and text to speech software. These technologies have provided an opportunity to advance survey research methodologies. Datamar and many other national polling companies such as Rassmussen, Insider Advantage, Public Policy Polling (PPC), and Survey USA among others, are turning to automated phone systems using these new technologies.
………..Comparing Automated and Live approaches
The classic political survey using live interviewers to communicate with respondents is both inefficient and fraught with other problems.
- Interviewers have a variety of accents impeding communication.
- Interviewer fatigue may cause problems with pronunciation of words.
- Respondents may react differently to the gender or perceived ethnicity of interviewers.
- There is also the problem of respondents hanging up on interviewers, which after awhile, has to take a toll in the interviewer’s morale.
The Datamar IVR system, for example, uses the voice of a professional announcer, so no matter how many calls are made, each respondent hears exactly the same questions and each question is asked the same way. The system doesn’t care how many times it gets hung-up on; the voice, enthusiasm, and question presentation remain the same for every call.
………..”Who are You Going to Call ?”
Just as important as the development of modern automated phone system is the advancement of computer hardware and software for handling data. How you call and conduct the poll is important but who you call is critical. Telephone polling originally depended on random digit dialing (RDD) phone lists. These lists are randomly generated using the prefix numbers of the particular area to be polled.
The respondents may or may not be registered voters and while there are many statistical techniques for eliminating some of the error, the results are somewhat dubious. To address this uncertainty many polling companies have started purchasing registered voter lists from commercial vendors.
Datamar uses advanced data mining techniques and extensive analysis of voter registration files supplied by the Secretary of State or other voter registration agencies.
This allows identification of the most likely actual voters to call and thereby get accurate information with a confidence level that is significantly higher than possible with RDD’s or randomly selected commercial voter lists. Datamar is the only national company that generates custom calling lists in-house for each poll.
Modern polls provide more information than “who is ahead” in approval ratings. Polls provide a campaign with the strategic information required to understand voter concerns and successfully identify and communicate with all segments of the electorate.
As the advance of technology continues to expand what is possible, those who fail to adopt these new tools will suffer the fate of those in the last century who failed to embrace the concept of telephone polling.
Glossary of terms used in this column: VOIP is ‘Voice Over Internet Protocol”…… IVR is ‘Interactive Voice Response”.
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Jim Sills is a political consultant…… If you have questions about your future in San Diego and California elections, you can contact Jim at this e-mail address: YourElectionVictory@hotmail.com
He has aided the campaigns of Rep. Darrell Issa, Assemblywoman Shirley Horton, California State Senators Joel Anderson & Tony Strickland, Rep. Devin Nunes, and Assessor/Recorder Greg Smith, among many others.