Do the customers/beneficiaries have access to a mobile phone? Does the organization have access to mobile phone numbers? Are the people you went to reach located in areas with a reliable network connection? If not, 60 Decibels may recommend local partners for in-person interviews.

Does your company have phone numbers for at least 80% of its active customer base? For a study to be representative, a substantial portion of your customer base should be reachable. If your company has less than 80% coverage, the results may be biased, and we will explore alternative analytical approaches.

Are the phone numbers you have up-to-date and verified? High-quality phone numbers are crucial for achieving a desirable response rate and ensuring data representativeness.

Are your customers well-acquainted with your product or service? Do customers know the name of your product? Have customers used your product? The respondents should be able to provide meaningful feedback based on their experience.

All contacts must be provided in compliance with relevant data protection and privacy regulations of your country or region.

Our main responsibilities are to:

• Understand your business context and impact thesis
• Translate your impact thesis into an agreed-upon set of metrics
• Design a custom survey, or use one of our standard Sector Surveys, to gather these metrics, using our tried-and-tested questions developed over more than 2,000 projects. This survey is a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions.
• Receive customer contact details from you (typically mobile phone numbers)—a large enough number so we can pick an appropriate representative sample.
• (Once you’ve approved the survey) Deploy the survey using our network of 1,000+ trained in-country Research Assistants across 80 countries, randomly calling from the list of numbers you’ve provided
• Clean and code all of the collected data
• Analyse the collected data and synthesis the insights
• Deliver a report, dashboard, and/or dataset to summarize the key findings, and your impact performance compared against our Global Benchmarks

Our goal, with this approach, is to make it as straightforward as possible to get the impact performance and customer feedback data that will help you serve your customers better, create great impact for them, and drive improved results for your business.

We aim to make this as easy for you as possible. We will schedule one kickoff call with you discuss the process, answer your questions, and give us the chance to get to know you, your business, and the customers/beneficiaries you serve.

This call forms the foundation of our first survey draft. We will send you a copy of this survey to review. Once we’ve incorporated any feedback and have your sign-off, your next steps depend on the method we have chosen together. Most of the time, we conduct phone surveys, so we’ll need a list of your customers and their phone numbers. If we are using email, we’ll need their email addresses.

At this point, you’ll typically turn things over to us. In some cases, though (whether to increase response rates or simply to avoid surprises) you’ll choose to let your customers know in advance to expect our phone call. If you decide to do this, we’ll provide all the supporting information you need to make this as easy as possible (e.g. if you want to send the email, we will provide you with a link to the survey and a pre-drafted email so all you have to do is hit send!)

We’ll take it from there.

We need this information to contact your customers. 60 Decibels only speaks to participants who have provided their consent to be contacted. Typically we will ask you to provide us with:

• Respondent Name
• Phone number (where phone & SMS surveys are conducted)
• Email (where email surveys are conducted)

Where possible, we also ask for additional non-sensitive personal data, such as product purchased or approximate geography (city or state). This enables us to ensure a representative sample and conduct additional segmentation analysis, where required.

Select members of the project team have full access to the data while it is being collected and analysed. Once collected and cleaned, your data will be analyzed to produce your results deck. You will also receive the cleaned raw anonymized dataset at the end of the project.

No one besides the 60 Decibels team and the Project Company will see customers’ personally identifiable information (PII).

When sharing the survey results with Clients or the Project Company, personal contact information (name, contact number, etc.) will be excluded from the dataset, making it impossible to identify the respondent. Once the project is completed, we strip all personally identifiable information (PII) from the data set and remove the identity of the Project Company to create a version of the responses that is Aggregated Data. We include this fully anonymized and aggregated version in our Database for benchmarking purposes. Our management of PII, as well as what data we share in what form, is governed by our contract and confidentiality agreement with you: 60decibels.com/terms-of-service/

After data collection, 60 Decibels will share the Company Report and a data file with the raw anonymized responses with the Project Company and the Client. The Project Company is the owner and the controller of these Deliverables. There may be certain circumstances when a Client or Project Company requests a different ownership structure, which will be governed by our contract and terms of service with you.