Comparing Positly to the competition

There are many ways to recruit participants, so what makes Positly better?

We’ve put together this guide to show you how Positly matches up to the competition.

It starts with the mission…

Our mission is to accelerate high-quality human subject research. This is because we believe that many of the challenges we face are human-related. Whether it is helping people with psychological treatments, understanding cultural differences, or just making good data-driven decisions, they all rely on great research.

Enabling high-quality, meaningful human subject research requires that we solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in research: participant recruitment and management. Researchers need a faster, more affordable way to recruit and manage high-quality research participants, and that’s where Positly comes in.

… and leads to the methods

Our core mission requires that we have a clear approach to designing and developing our platform. In fact, every single feature is designed specifically for high-quality research and developed for scalability.

Designed for high quality research

Many researchers use platforms that aren’t designed specifically for high-quality research; this can cost researchers a lot of time, energy, money, and invalid results.

We think a researcher’s job isn’t to figure out complex systems to find quality participants, so we provide best-practice research methods directly into our tools. We allow researchers to customize their studies in many ways, but a researcher isn’t required to spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on details such as preventing duplication, calculating incentives, performing quality checks, or other measures. Positly does all of this (and more) right out of the box.

Developed for scale

Positly is designed with scale in mind. When we design a feature, we think about the many different contexts in which the feature could be used. Then, we try to get to the root of the problem that the researcher has and abstract the solution to the most universally useful feature. Finally, we ensure that the feature behaves in a way that the researcher would expect.

Our development process means that all researchers on Positly benefit from a versatile tool that is customizable to their needs. As we develop and release new features, Positly can be applied in different research contexts, all while maintaining a familiar and intuitive interface – freeing time for researchers to do what they do best.

Comparisons with other providers

Student research pools

Universities and colleges often have participant pools available for researchers to solicit for studies. These are primarily student participants who often participate for course credit or as a requirement of their course. While this makes in-person studies easier and can sometimes reduce the cost of paying participants (such as if it is a course credit requirement), the student participants are rarely a representative population and are often in high demand, which results in low numbers of participants for researchers.

A significant portion of psychology (and other social science research) study participants are U.S. college students participating for class credit – many of them are psychology students themselves (67%, according to Henrich et al., 2010).

Furthermore, the tools to manage these pools are usually limited in their sophistication, especially when conducting longitudinal studies or tracking participant attributes.

Positly draws from a more diverse group of participants who are rewarded fairly for their time, enabling larger and more accurate samples.

Market research firms

Market research firms can be helpful in providing full service to large companies and well-funded academic research. Many of these companies have access to large and diverse panels across the globe.
However, using these firms is often cost-prohibitive and time-prohibitive for smaller teams with lower budgets.

Positly is designed as a self-serve tool that can be learned quickly at an affordable cost.

Microtasking and crowdsourcing

Microtasking and crowdsourcing platforms have revolutionized social science research and have opened a large participant pool to researchers. However, their interfaces are not specifically designed for research and can be difficult to customize for high-quality research.

Positly helps researchers access a large audience while saving time on customization, headaches with quality controls, and money.

Survey exchanges

There are many sites around the internet where researchers can “exchange surveys.” They often use a “credit” system or have a community norm of participation. Aside from the enormous amount of time required for a researcher to earn enough “credits,” it can often mean that researchers can dominate the participant pool and, in many ways, could be an even less representative population than students.

Most survey exchanges are also quite limited in their features, which means that researchers are often left to manually handle things like approvals, quality checks, demographic targeting, and reporting and cannot easily conduct more advanced studies such as multi-part or longitudinal studies.

Positly is a full-featured participant recruitment and management tool that has a diverse range of participants immediately available for researchers. This saves researchers a lot of time and makes the results of the research much more meaningful.

Social media

Increasingly, social media is being used to recruit survey participants. The participants can range from family and friends to people within specific interest groups. Sometimes, participants recruited from social media are the exact ones you need (e.g., a specific interest group), but that typically isn’t the case. Recruiting with social media will also require that you manage your own incentives (if you use any) and messaging, and it can be difficult for longitudinal studies.

Positly enables you to target (and report on) specific participant attributes while allowing participants to stay anonymous and enabling management tools like payment and messaging.

Specialised platforms

Several platforms exist for specific recruitment uses, such as interviewing a participant, conducting a specific type of study, or being a bolt-on feature of a survey tool. These can be very well optimized for their intended use. However, they are not very flexible and can be difficult (or impossible) to use for the variety of research you want to conduct.

Positly is a versatile and flexible platform that enables researchers to conduct a wide variety of research.

Advertising

Traditionally, advertising has been a common recruitment method. Newspaper classifieds have been a key tool for many researchers for a long time. In recent years, online advertising has revolutionized the ability to target advertising. Many online advertising platforms can provide incredibly sophisticated targeting for researchers and allow them to reach participants from all over the world.

However, the targeting provided is not the standard that a screener would produce, and the information isn’t passed onto the researcher, so it requires quite some sophistication to get the right participants for your studies. Furthermore, the cost of acquisition can often be too high for many researchers. Advertising platforms can only attract users to a page where they can sign up. It is up to the researcher to use additional tools to sign up the participants, track their activity, and then do management, such as paying incentives or messaging participants for follow-up studies.

Positly helps you identify relevant participants and provides you with the tools to manage them throughout the entire research process.

Do you need another comparison?

Do you have a specific set of needs or a specific platform that you need to compare before you make the decision for your research? Let us know.