Hope you are all ready for part 3. You may have noticed that these little articles do not follow any particular order, but I have been taking notes, and survey taking is something I am passionate about so I hope you get as keen, and as much out of the experience as I do.

You may not have been around the forum for long, but you cannot have failed to notice that I recently had a birthday!! I am not shy….I love birthdays, and as they are only once a year, I always make the most of them. The days surrounding my birthday had to have been some of the best days I have had recently for earning/learning in terms of survey experiences. I really mean that.

On my birthday, as I have said elsewhere, I received the following email from Talking Food –

Congratulations!
Dear Lizzie ,
We are delighted to announce that you are one of four winners in the February prize draw on Talking Food!Having accumulated everyone who participated on the discussion board, surveys and Fork Talk throughout the month, you have been drawn as a winner to receive a cheque for £50.To claim your prize, simply e-mail us with the full name and postal address of the person we should make the cheque out to and we will post it off as soon as we can. We would also like to mention your name in our next newsletter, please let us know if you are happy for us to do so.Congratulations and we look forward to your future participation on Talking Food.
Yours sincerely
The Talking Food team

I was so pleased, in particular because, as a general rule, I try to avoid survey taking which have prize draws as incentives. By this I mean there are really more than enough survey companies/panels out there who will reward you with individual incentives, i.e. points or pounds or vouchers per survey, as opposed to offering you an entry in a sweepstakes (American terminology) or an entry in a free prize draw for your time and opinions. Try to stick to the companies who offer you individual incentives. As a rule, I very rarely veer from this because it is so rare to hear of winners in these draws!! I can’t say now though that no-one wins! I won a cheque for £200 from One-Poll a couple of years ago, too, which stunned me, just in time for Christmas, and Synovate have also honoured me in a prize draw years ago with a cheque for £50 when it was the case that individual incentives did not exist in this company – happily, though, they do now, however Synovate require you to reach the staggering amount of 9000 points before you can redeem these for just a £5 BACS payment straight into your bank account. A long way to go!

To continue however with the story of my lucky streak which is still continuing I may say….March is always lucky for me I think! The same day (my birthday) I received a telephone call asking me if I was available to take part in a telephone interview about make-up. I had completed a survey for Survey Network just three weeks prior to this, and at the end of the survey, I was asked if I would be interested in taking part in further research on the subject (if you remember we discussed the pros and cons of further contact in the last part of this series of articles), and I ticked all the boxes, including the one which said I would be happy to take a face to face interview at a local destination for £80. Needless to say, as I live in Scotland, they probably felt that it was a long way to come just to ask my opinion, so opted for the telephone alternative, a box which I also ticked. A time was duly arranged and at the end of the one hour interview, which, by the way, was amazingly indepth, including that classic (well I always consider it classic!) question…..“if your make-up was a person, what would it be like?” Now can you beat that for a question you just have to answer with as much savoir faire as you can manage?? It reminds me of my school days when we used to do Music & Movement (showing my age here) and the voice over the radio said “be a tree, and show me all your branches waving in the wind…” I love the imagination, and flights of fancy!! It is possible to characterize products, but not something that is easy to do….how would you, for example, describe a cheese spread as a person? Seriously, this is not such a far-fetched question as you might think. A while ago I was taking part in a £25 telephone interview for Playstation and was asked to go into a room and imagine the room was the Playstation and describe what I saw in my mind’s eye…..how do you describe a Playstation? It’s black, and it has knobs on??!! You try it, it is not quite as easy as you think….but to go completely off on another tack, one of the things survey taking does for you is to allow your imagination to take wing…..and the more that you allow these flights of fancy to enter into your survey taking experiences, the more invitations you will get. Try it and see. I know whereof I speak. The more you are willing to truly enter into the spirit of what the company is looking for, i.e. a consumer who knows WHY they buy a product, for how much money, and with what ends, aims and means in mind when they pick it up and put it in their trolley, then the more you are in demand as a person who can be relied upon to produce an authentic survey for the panel to pass on to the client who has paid them to do just that!

Anyway, after that short digression, the end result of the interview was that I was asked for my full name and address and the person to whom the cheque should be made out to, and suffice it to say that there is a £50 cheque on its way to me even as we speak. That means I am £100 up for only a couple of days work….not to mention the other surveys I have taken during the course of a normal week. Incidentally, my earnings on a normal year average out about £1200.

As if the above were not enough, and my cup had not already runneth over….Sunday evening came and as I had spent a good deal of Sunday lolling about online and joined up with a very interesting forum about pensions, I was not a little surprised to get a phone call from a lovely lady who asked me if I would like to attend a forum discussion group IN PERSON (I have never had the fortune to do this before and always wanted to) for which I would be paid £50!!! It was being run, unfortunately too far away for me to attend, in Glasgow, when I live in the Highlands, so I had to decline, but the opportunity was there if I could have travelled. I was sad to say no, but was going to be kept in mind for future reference, she told me. Wow, what a chance! To me, this would be the real McCoy….a chance to interact with other people who are there for the same reason you are, and no, before you ask, it would not be just to make some money!! It really is, to me, almost the icing on the cake to be able to make money at something I so thoroughly enjoy.

I also have a few comments in general to make on some subjects I intend to cover more indepth in future. For example, if you do not succeed in completing a survey for whatever reason, should you just write it off, or should you do something about it. After all, you have spent maybe 20 minutes of your time trying to complete this survey, and for whatever reason it has not been possible to do so, maybe a technical error or maybe you were screened out. You will always know if you have been screened out as you get a message to the effect that “thank you for your time, these are all the questions we have for you today, your profile does not fit our client’s needs” – this can be very disappointing if it happens a lot. And if it does, ask yourself are you up to date with all your profiles on the site? Are you signed up with enough companies to ensure a diversity of inbox invitations? Believe me, there are so many out there, your inbox need never be empty again!! Then again, if the reason you were unable to finish was technical, ask yourself if the 500 other people taking this survey had the same problem or not, and would the company be pleased to know there was a problem….what if everyone ignored the technical issue and they did not know the survey had a glitch in it? You have a duty both to your own integrity as a survey taker and to the company you sign up with to point out the technical issue.

Some companies leave a lot to be desired in terms of customer service, and you may never hear a thing again, but there are others who delight in being told problems, so they can rectify them, and they have the goodness to realize you have taken time out of your busy valuable day to do this and they will as a goodwill gesture, reward you with the amount of points you have missed out on. I did this once, and was awarded enough to redeem my points.

I think we have covered a few bases here in the above, and I hope you have enjoyed the experience. Stay tuned for the next exciting episode…but I won’t tell you what we will talk about….one thing about this interesting pastime is that you never know what will turn up next…..altogether now, if Andrex were a person, what would he be like?!