By Sara Price

Even when the weather forecast is completely clear of rain, the URC team can sometimes be seen on campus carrying around boxes containing hundreds of umbrellas. This is because we set up tables at widely attended student events in order to invite signups for our participant pool. Small incentives such as umbrellas decorated with Harvard logos, handed out in exchange for completed signup forms, help us to recruit future user research study participants.  

Building A Participation Pool

Even the best survey, usability test, interview, or other user research study component cannot produce insights without participants. The URC maintains a voluntary participant pool that includes names, email addresses, and relevant demographic information for over 1400 students and other Harvard affiliates. 

We build up the pool substantially by engaging with students at events, especially at the beginning of the school year.  In addition, we often ask survey participants whether they would like to join this pool.  We seek to include representatives of different demographic categories within the context of higher education.  This is because at times we target particular populations for study participation, for example when we design recruitment emails aimed at either undergraduate or graduate students.

Sending Out Recruitment Emails

At the URC, we use Mailchimp to design the layout for recruitment emails and send them to our participant pool. This software allows us to design, save, and reuse custom templates by arranging blocks of text, images, or other content. 

A recruitment email should be concise and clear in its messaging and point potential study participants to the next step to take. It is helpful for us to maintain and regularly refresh a general format for these messages in order to make sending recruitment emails easier and faster. The Recruitment page on the URC website has some sample recruitment messages as a start.

Effective Incentives

The URC often finds virtual Amazon gift card codes to be popular and easily distributed incentives.  Sometimes physical incentives are more useful, such as when we have a table set up to recruit participants in person and so want a small item to hand out immediately.  

Affordable physical incentives that have previously worked for us to distribute in person include the previously mentioned umbrellas, as well as snacks and USB drives.  Additional examples are included on our Incentives page.

Pro tip: include a mention of incentives in the subject line of your recruitment emails. My experience is that this tends to result in good response rates, in my view because people are drawn to pay attention by the clear mention of a reward. 

In the future, a project I would like to take on is analyzing what subject lines are the most effective.  This would include taking a look at the analytics in Mailchimp in order to determine what days and which times of day are most popular, in terms of clicks on the survey and email opens.  This is just another way we can keep all of our work user-centered.