Item: Pollfish
Rating: 9
Author: Matthew Kararo

Overall Satisfaction with Pollfish

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pollfish is our primary online data collection vendor. We partner with them to run about 80-90% of our data collection overall. We initially started using them as a way to quickly collect anonymous data in specific geographic areas for political clients, but that has evolved into a deeper partnership that includes their maintenance of a panel that is linked back to a national data file that allows us to connect survey responses to individualized data points for both political and consumer variables. Our organization is also now in the entertainment space, and Pollfish/Prodege has allowed us to run monthly tracking surveys with minimal maintenance on our end, and allows us to run A/B tests with features that ensure our clients continue trusting us, like screencap prevention software and data quality checks.

Pros and Cons

Pros

client management and communication
feature development and partnering to improve the platform
incentives to deepen the partnership, such as a higher % discount with a larger annual contract

Cons

project management quality since they outsource labor
advanced survey programming features, such as javascript etc.
transparency into the sampling features/process

Return on Investment

Has allowed us to expand into different business verticals
Has allowed us to expand our matched-back data offerings
Has allowed us to develop internal data offerings we can sell "off the shelf" for minimized acquisition cost

Usability

The user interface for the most part is intuitive, most question types that I can think of are available to use, and although the skip logic does not have quite the flexibility that I was used to with Qualtrics, it does work 95% of the time with some trial and error. Additionally, if there's ever a point where I get stuck, our account manager is incredibly helpful and quick to respond with a potential solution.

Alternatives Considered

Qualtrics XM for Strategy and Research

Pollfish may not have all of the back-end functionality with javascript, listserv samples etc., but it has a smaller learning curve as a platform and employees can be more easily trained on using it. Additionally, Pollfish/Prodege is consistently the most reasonable cost-wise when it comes to data acquisition when all parameters are included.

Key Insights

Do you think Pollfish delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Pollfish's feature set?

Yes

Did Pollfish live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Pollfish go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Pollfish again?

Yes

Other Software Used

IBM SPSS Statistics, ChatGPT, Meltwater

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need anonymous data from either a national sample or a specific geographic location, Pollfish is great. If the geography is limited, as with any online sample vendor, there are restrictions as far as sample quality and size. If you need identified data, Pollfish/Prodege is willing to go the extra mile to create a solution. The only real use case I can think of that they haven't been able to accommodate is a listserv upload to deploy emails with survey links contained inside the body of the email.

Pollfish Feature Ratings

Comments

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Pollfish is a Growth-Minded Partner