Below are a couple paragraphs that might be included in the RFP for a survey provider. The “Our Guidance” paragraphs are optional but I think it is a good opportunity to steer the proposals in the right direction.
Regarding the Survey to Registrants and Potential Registrants
The surveys of registrants has the twin risks of:
- Being the most expensive part of the work, and
- Returning little or no value if not done properly
Therefore the bidders proposal must address:
- The survey contents, i.e., questions that: :
- registrants are willing to answer and
- When answered, will provide meaningful information
- The survey methodology, the manner of economically reaching registrants in sufficient numbers to provide statistically meaningful results. (Less than 1% of the world’s population has registered a domain name.)
The ICANN volunteer policy team developing registrant survey questions has only created the rough drafts. These questions, when answered by registrant in significant numbers, will inform the discussion of the Charter questions that you have read. ICANN staff and policy volunteers will continue to hone the survey questions during the vendor selection process and then will work with the selected survey provider to create a set of questions and methodology to economically and effectively elicit the requisite data.
Our guidance on this is:
To increase the likelihood that registrants respond and to control costs:
- The survey should be relatively short
- Most or all of the questions should be multiple choice
- Open ended questions (if any) should be at the end
- Requests for personal information should be avoided
To reach a requisite number of respondents, the survey provider might:
- Use access to large survey panels
- Using domain industry contacts, develop incentives, and work with registrars to directly reach out to their customers