Recipient Household Welcome Call Rapport Strategy

In Simple Words

Initiating a brief, non-intrusive introduction call months in advance establishes trust and familiarity, acting like a friendly courtesy call before a major appointment that makes people far more willing to answer the phone later.

Research question

Conducting endline financial surveys with remote recipient households in developing countries suffers from high attrition and non-response rates if researchers cold-call participants without prior engagement.

Participants

N = 2,075 target recipient households in the Philippines paired with overseas migrant workers in the UAE.

Study Design

Two-stage panel survey design featuring an introductory non-survey welcome call at baseline to explain research objectives and build rapport prior to a 30-40 minute endline phone survey administered 30 weeks later.

Results

The preliminary welcome call strategy enabled completion of 2,075 detailed endline household surveys despite high phone survey attrition challenges (with only ~10% explicit refusal rate).

Takeaway

Conduct brief, non-survey introductory welcome calls with remote panel study participants to build rapport months before administering lengthier endline surveys.

Read alongside the research

Plain-English glossary

Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.

Baseline

The starting measurements in a study. Researchers use these to compare what participants were like at the start with what happens later.

ExampleBefore a training programme starts, researchers measure workers’ earnings. That first measurement is the baseline.

GET-IT glossary · Baseline characteristics ↗Read more about baseline →

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