How to calculate the perfect user research incentive

At People for Research, we have lost count how many times clients have asked us: "what would be the right incentive for our participants?". It can be challenging to achieve the perfect incentive balance, making sure your participants feel rewarded for their time and feedback, but also ensuring this cost doesn't consume an excessive amount of your budget.

If you are not sure what we are talking about, let's go back to basics for a minute. An incentive is any gift, payment or other reward offered to individuals for their participation in user research. The right incentive can definitely make or break your research and user recruitment, as it can increase participation in your study, help to reduce drop-out rates, facilitate access to hard-to-reach groups, and ensure participants feel appropriately rewarded for their efforts.

The perfect incentive is a combination of:

• An amount that attracts the right participants and takes into account their profile and availability.
• The type of research study you are planning to run.
• Your research budget.

If you select People for Research as your user recruitment partner, one of the things we can help you with is to strike the perfect incentive balance by considering various relevant factors about your audience and your research study. But, if you want to start planning your incentive now, keep reading and hopefully this article will provide useful insights.

What to consider when planning your incentive.

Demographics

• If relevant, general demographics need to be determined before deciding what you will offer your participants. Typically, the less demographically complex your study is, the smaller the incentive can be, compared to research studies that have multiple layers of demographic targeting. This would include, for example, age, location, gender identification, sexual orientation, education level, marital status, employment and ethnicity.
• Consider the participant’s location! Although London has a higher cost of living and you may assume participants residing in the capital would require a higher incentive, it's actually easier to recruit participants in bigger cities. If you need to recruit in more remote locations or smaller cities, then your incentive will need to be adjusted accordingly.

Professional context and income

• Individuals who work in senior positions or own their own business and, therefore, may have a higher than average income are more likely to need a higher incentive to attract them to apply and take the time to participate in research.
• Consider how niche their role is and if they perform very specific tasks or use highly specialised tools or software to perform their job.
• Take into account their availability. For example, a business owner is more likely to be time-poor, when compared to someone who works part-time in retail. Another great example are healthcare professionals, who are extremely time-poor and hard to recruit. Similarly to other professionals audiences, they are not particularly active on LinkedIn (one of the tools we use to free find B2B participants), especially those working at a senior level or in more hands-on roles.
• If targeting business owners, CEOs, founders or directors, we need to consider the sizes of the companies you want to target. The bigger the company, the bigger the incentive must be.
• On the opposite side of the scale, individuals who are retired, students or work part-time are likely to have more availability and, therefore, require a more average incentive.

Type of research and what is being asked of the participant

• The longer the study, typically the higher the incentive needs to be. Your need to consider the time participants are dedicating to complete the research and provide good quality feedback. An appropriate incentive means the participant is more likely to stay engaged during the recruitment process and the study itself. Examples of longer research formats are usually anything longer than a couple of hours, from half-day workshops to a month-long diary study.
• Consider the complexity of your research as well. Testing an online shopping journey and testing the accessibility levels of a website are very different in terms of requirements for the participants.
• Speaking of accessibility-focused research, if you are asking users of assistive technology to use their devices or software during the testing, take that into account.
• Surveys and unmoderated tasks (e.g. card sorts or treejacks) are usually straightforward and much quicker to complete, generally lasting 10-15 minutes. Our general recommendation is to incentivise your participants starting at £1 per minute.
• Are you running your research remotely or asking participants to travel to you and attend a face-to-face session? If you are running in-person research, our advice is to increase your incentive to account for travel expenses and the extra time it will take for your participants to travel back and forth.

Extra considerations

• Does the participant need to share any real data (e.g. their payslip)? If a participant is required to provide real personal data during the session or task, then you will probably need to offer a higher incentive. Confidential data is a valuable asset and, if required, participants should be appropriately rewarded.
• Is the research about a sensitive topic (e.g. funeral/bereavement, illness, etc.)? If you are asking the participant to talk about a topic that could be considered sensitive, take that into consideration when deciding on your incentive. Here is an example of a recruitment project where we were tasked with recruiting 40 participants for sensitive research with the Alzheimer's Society.
• If you are running research with users with access needs or health conditions, they may require the assistance of a carer to complete the session. In most cases, you are also expected to also incentivise the carers, so make sure that is part of your budget.

Offering an appropriate incentive is crucial to the success of your user research and recruitment. Make sure you weigh all the factors listed in this blog before deciding on a final amount and we can guarantee this will help you more efficiently reach and engage with your desired audience.