Recruiting participants

Tag(s)

Research & testing

Cook(s)

Jung Mee ParkRebecca BlakistonBob Liu

Nutrition profile

You designed the perfect research study, but now what? In most cases, you'll need to recruit participants.

Cooking time

Varies depending on the scale and scope of your project. For moderated studies where you're scheduling time with participants, a general guideline is to recruit 3-6 days in advance.

Perfect for

When you are conducting research and need to identify people to participate.

Prep work

Create a research plan

See our recipe on research planning and make sure you've clearly articulated your research goals and questions. For recruitment, make sure you know:

• How many people you want to recruit. This is usually a range. What's the minimum number of people for you to draw conclusions? For usability testing and qualitative studies, often 5-10 is plenty (see How Many Test Users in a Usability Study by Nielsen Norman Group). For quantitative surveys where you hope to draw in statistical significance, you'll want many more.
• What channels you plan to recruit from. Consider mailing lists, social media, flyers, and/or your personal or professional network.

Identify your audience

Before inviting people to participate, determine any inclusion or exclusion criteria. Do people require specific knowledge or experience to provide you with useful data? For example, do they need to:

• Be currently enrolled in a program?
• Know how to use an iPhone?
• Have children who live with them?

Keep in mind that not all studies will require criteria, and you don't want to exclude people who aren't the "ideal" audience for your product. For broad-serving products, you can gain useful insights from people with a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Ingredients

Incentives

Whenever possible, compensate participants for their time. Cash is most effective, including PayPal, Visa, and Amazon gift cards.

• In industry, the average incentive for a 30 minute study is $40-$60, or for an hour $70-$100 (based on findings from UserInterviews.com).
• You can offer less for remote participation and when you have goodwill with your users.
• You should offer more if you're doing targeted recruitment of particular professionals.

When cash isn't possible, swag is another option. Premium, unique, or targeted swag works best. For in-person studies, food and drink are good options. See The Story of Tiny Café for ideas on how to do frequent, fast, and frugal recruitment.

Email manager

Consider a tool such as Mailchimp to manage email communications and create appealing recruitment emails. If you're doing research as part of your regular practice, you might benefit from creating a participant pool.

Scheduling tool

Make scheduling easy for participants by using a tool that allows them to sign up in one step. Avoid back-and-forth emails for scheduling, since you'll likely lose people in the process.

Examples of tools:

• Calendly works well for scheduling one-on-one appointments, can sync with your Outlook or Google calendar, and can sync with your Zoom account. Free basic account.
• Doodle works well for finding times that works for a group of people and can sync with your Outlook or Google calendar. Free basic account.
• SignUpGenius works well for setting specific time slots and having people sign up, though has no syncing capabilities. Free basic account.

A fancy recruitment tool (optional)

If you have the funding and are doing ongoing research, a system like Userinterviews.com can help you manage the entirety of the recruitment process.

Directions

Write the ask

Subject lines in recruitment emails, as well as headlines on flyers and in newsletters, have a huge impact on response rates. Make them succinct and specific.

The message body should be succinct, direct, and approachable.

• Make the greeting personal, such as “Good morning IT admins,” "Hey undergraduate students," or "Dear new instructors." If you have a bigger pool but have inclusion and exclusion criteria, you can say "We think you're likely to qualify."
• Briefly, include the purpose of the study, any incentive, and how much time you’re asking of them.
• Include a clear call to action, such as “Schedule a Zoom conversation with me” or “Complete the 5-minute survey.”

The closing should humanize the researcher by including a real name, job title (when appropriate), and a personal email (or phone number) for them to respond to.

Prepare consent forms (optional)

Ethical research requires you get consent from your participants if you plan to record them or store their information. Work with your organization to gather the appropriate consent language and/or forms. IRB studies require specific consent forms (if you’re at the University of Arizona, see Consent Templates).

If you plan to share photos, video, or audio of participants, get a multimedia release form, which can usually be found through your marketing department (if you’re at the University of Arizona, see Multi-media content and release form).

Secure participants

Send participants a reminder a day before or on the day of their scheduled session (some scheduling tools will do this for you).

Consider a backup plan for no-shows. Even with reminders, expect 5-12% to not show up. The less the incentive and the less convenient the location, the more likely you'll have no-shows. Budget time for no-shows, maybe scheduling back-ups, overbooking, or having an extra day that's only used if necessary. If you have backups that you don’t use, consider providing them an incentive anyway (perhaps of lesser value) to thank them for signing up.

Thank participants after the study. Be sure to provide any incentives immediately, and when possible share the results or impact of their participation. If you conduct studies regularly, ask participants if you can contact them again for future input.

Plating

Internally, you may want to use a spreadsheet or database to track your participants and their information. For example:

• Name
• Contact information
• Date of initial contact
• If they have declined, confirmed, or not responded
• Demographics or status
• Date and time scheduled

You also may want to associate your participant tracker with the data you collect during your study. Notion and Airtable are helpful tools for doing this.

In addition to organizing this information for your project team, these data (anonymized) can be helpful for creating final reports, presenting recommendations to stakeholders, and analyzing data.

Pro tips

• Brevity is the soul of wit. When the recruitment email is too long, people lose interest or miss important points while skimming.
• Make sure your tone in the invitation is warm. Test out the language with your team members, since everyone will have a different reaction to the text.
• Read the invitation out loud; you tend to catch more mistakes that way.
• If recruiting remotely, pay attention to time zones! Participants may assume something is automatically in their time zone.
• Send to many more people than you need. Expect a 7% response rate to your ask if you're sending out emails (reported by UserInterviews.com). But know that the relationship your organization has with its users has a huge effect on a response rate, and goodwill goes a long way.
• If you’re sending out a second request for the same project, use a thread so recipients know it's the same. You can say something like, "Hi, we're just following up on this since we're still looking for people."
• Texting can have a greater response rate than email, but can be abused. If you use texting, do your research around best practices (e.g. allow opting out, reference who you are, personalize).

Resources

How Many Test Users in a Usability Study? Nielsen Norman Group

Credits

UserInterviews.com