Expert Elicitation Global Survey

We have collaborated with researchers from various institutions from the United States to build a global survey to collect expert feedback on Natural Climate Solutions.

About the project

We have developed a global expert survey along with a marketing campaign to collect expert feedback on possible Natural Climate Solutions.

Location:

United States

Industry:

Climate research

Services:

Research acceleration

Business type:

University / Non-Profit

Challenges

A research team of scientists from various organizations, like The Nature Conservancy, McGill University, Pomona College, and Vulcan LLC, faced the challenge of contacting 100k+ researchers from all over the globe through email and to ask them to fill out a survey that is specifically tailored to collect expert feedback on Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) and interactions with human well-being.

Solution

The project goal was to build an interactive web survey for NCS co-benefits synthesis: to effectively distribute the survey to target participants based on their expertise via email campaigns, possibly worldwide. To achieve this, a user-friendly, transparent, and easy-to-use survey had to be developed to ensure to get the most responses possible.

The survey consists of multiple questions, most of them dynamically adjusted to the participant based on their previous experience and previous answers. The survey features the following blocks:

Region-based experience assessment and evidence map validation
Discrete Choice Experiment
Demographic information

The survey is accessible through a unique URL that is created for each participant and stored in a cloud database. During the completion of the survey, answers are saved into this database to allow evaluation and postprocessing which is the main goal of the Client. Participants’ email addresses were extracted from a database that was a result of a previous project (between the Client and Lexunit).

The idea was to combine cold outreach and subscription-based email marketing to send the survey invitation to recipients. The invitation contains a short personalized text that describes the project and the unique survey URL. The email marketing was carried out using the Activecampaign cloud platform, incorporating a long warm-up period, contact segmentation, multiple A/B tests, different types of follow-ups, and precise tagging to track events. The whole process contained 26 email campaigns carefully arranged into 2 automation that controlled the sending of approximately 350K emails to 109K contacts in 18 weeks.

Results

The result is a software deployed in the cloud under the Client’s domain, that consists of a database, backend, and frontend to facilitate the interactive survey. This software is capable of adding a new contact, creating a personalized survey, and initiating the email sending via Activecampaign.

Furthermore, the gathered survey answers provide important insight to the Client and could be the basis of a research project that refines the current knowledge about NCS and co-benefits.