How the Copy Prior Year Function can Improve Participation Rates

WHAT IS COPY PRIOR YEAR?

Very simply, the Copy Prior Year function allows participants in a multi-year study to copy data from the previous year into subsequent years. From there, users only need to update the information that has changed, saving them a significant amount of time.

WHAT BENEFITS DOES COPY PRIOR YEAR PROVIDE?

Helps Maintain Participation Rates Year Over Year
For many organizations, much of their data doesn’t change significantly from year to year. In the second year and beyond of a study, Copy Prior Year helps maintain healthy participation from users who’ve previously participated. Additionally, should you add new questions to your study, you’re more likely to get answers to these when completing questions from previous years is made so easy.

Helps Participants Easily Meet Participation Thresholds
Commonly referred to as a “percentage completion requirement”, many studies require that users complete a minimum number of study questions to receive the results at a discount, for free, or to even access it at all. Copy Prior Year helps participants easily meet participation thresholds, especially when there are no significant changes to the study questions as compared to previous years.

COPY PRIOR YEAR IN ACTION

One of our clients recently used the Copy Prior Year function to successfully maintain participation and encourage users to meet threshold requirements despite nearly doubling the number of questions asked in their study. Given that this study required a 100% completion rate in order to receive study results free of charge, we found these results to be quite impressive.

Upon announcing the changes to the study, our client highlighted the Copy Prior Year function to its members to be used in two ways:

• Previous participants were encouraged to copy data from the prior year’s questions to the current year, leaving them with only having to complete the new questions and updating any other data that had changed.
• New participants were encouraged to enter the PREVIOUS year’s data so when it came to completing the current year they could also use the Copy Prior Year function to complete those entries quickly.

Our client was pleased to see increased participation rates despite the larger number of questions asked over previous years.

Copy Prior Year is a simple yet powerful tool that significantly improves the user experience by speeding the data entry process. It has become a standard feature used by all of our customers with multi-year surveys and can be instrumental in increasing both overall participation rates and percentage thresholds.