Many campaigns have received survey reports they could not rely on. The usual reasons are simple: entries filled sitting at home, convenient respondents instead of a fair sample, or no check at all after collection.
Four checks that fix this
- Stratified sampling: quotas by zone, demographic and booth, with random selection and never convenience.
- App-based collection: no paper forms, and data reaches the war room at once.
- GPS and time verification: each entry is geo-tagged and time-locked, so an entry made far from the booth is caught.
- Call-back quality check: a sample of respondents is called again to confirm the answers were real.
Three survey rounds
A baseline survey gives the starting picture. A mid-campaign tracking survey shows what has moved. A pre-announcement survey gives the final read before the Model Code of Conduct, so the last-mile strategy rests on fresh facts.
Phone (CATI) surveys work alongside the field survey, not instead of it. They are fast for issue ranking and single-topic tracking.