Following a recent egroup thread, Lisa Steadman has summarised the ways in which members are managing incentive payments for online projects…
PayPal – Important to ensure that you collect respondents’ PayPal email
TransferWise – Works really smoothly and is cheap for international payments
Parcity – Run by ICG member Shifra, this ofers respondents the choice of bank transfer, PayPal or charity donation. Good customer service.
Recruiters – Some handle incentives as part of the recruitment package, may charge additional fee but easy to send them the money which they then pass on directly
Client – may pay respondents by BACS (but take care re GDPR)
Amazon vouchers
BACS – a bit time consuming, but okay for smaller samples
Vouchers – various companies offer egift cards which you buy online. You just need the respondent’s email. Examples are John Lewis, M&S, Love2Shop
Giftpay – Easy to administer. Participants like it. Digital ‘flexi gift cards’ that can be spent at amazon but also Tesco, Sainsburys etc and wide range of major retailers (M&S, John Lewis, B&Q, Halfords, Superdrug etc, etc).
No cost to us to use (2% surcharge if you upload funds via credit card). Easy and quick – incentives simply emailed to respondents (bulk or individual). They currently have an offer where you can show your own branding on the gift card (this normally a premium feature) – we didn’t bother, as there are a dozen or so designs to choose from (ranging form simple contemporary to hideously tacky).
tremendous.com. One of my clients (a research vendor) uses that for all rewards. It offers the respondent a choice of things
Amazon e-voucher – although watch out if international as it has to be from the local Amazon site. Some respondents are quite anti-Amazon so may be good to offer a choice.