As market researchers in an increasingly connected world, the ability to understand and react to real time events is becoming more and more important.

At Harris Interactive, we use a tool called QuickSurveys which allows us to collect an indicative view about any topic in an impressively short amount of time amongst Toluna panel members. QuickSurveys was recently used by a colleague, Georgiana Brown, to assess the impact of the last Government budget announcement amongst the general public – this blog can be read here.

With summer time fast approaching, I thought that it would be interesting to have a closer look at QuickSurveys and collect some data about a number of UK visitor attractions to understand which attractions had previously been visited amongst the general public along with the likelihood of visiting the various attractions in the future.

The questions were fielded on Thursday 21st May and the whole process of programming and collecting the data took around two and a half hours. I am certainly no computer programmer! But I programmed the questions on QuickSurveys myself, the whole process was very easy and uses an extremely intuitive interface. The software is even able to weight the resulting dataset to be nationally representative and to provide charts for immediate use. The user can select the sample size that they want by using a simple sliding scale. I set the quota to 350 and collected a total of 342 interviews in around an hour and a quarter.

Looking closer at the data, Alton Towers and Stonehenge were the most visited sites, with almost half of respondents having visited Alton Towers already in their lifetime and two-fifths having visited Stonehenge.

Chester Zoo, Kew Gardens, London Planetarium, Legoland, Longleat and Tate Modern all had similar proportions who had already visited (around a quarter) and Arley Hall and Dynamic Earth were the least visited attractions.

When asked about the likelihood of visiting attractions in the future, Alton Towers (28%), Stonehenge (26%), Tate Modern (24%), Kew Gardens (24%) and the Eden Project (23%) were the attractions that respondents are most either ‘absolutely certain’ or ‘very likely’ to visit, although Stonehenge, Kew Gardens and the Eden Project had the highest likelihood overall.

Jodrell Bank, Arley Hall and Dynamic Earth are least likely to be visited.
Respondents were also asked how far they are prepared to travel in terms of journey time to visit an attraction such as the ones that were listed in the survey. Results here are quite polarised showing that respondents are prepared to travel for a notable amount of time (two-thirds over 1.5 hours and two-fifths over 2 hours).

Within QuickSurveys, It is also possible to look at the data based on demographic splits held about panel members (e.g. age, gender, education, annual household income, region, ethnic background and employment) without prompting any of these questions. An external customer or consumer list can also be run through the product.
If you have a question or small set of questions that you need to quickly and indicatively measure then QuickSurveys is a very helpful resource to use. Please contact a member of the Harris Interactive team and they will be happy to tell you more about the product and to help you with your requirements.