Recipient Household Welcome Call Rapport Strategy
RCTClinical Trial
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.
Picture this
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.
What the evidence says
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).
- Who was studied
- N = 2,075 target recipient households in the Philippines paired with overseas migrant workers in the UAE.
- How
- 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.
What to do
Conduct brief, non-survey introductory welcome calls with remote panel study participants to build rapport months before administering lengthier endline surveys.
From the source
"During the welcome call, the household respondent was simply given an overview of the research study and asked if they would consent to being surveyed at a later date. No survey questions were asked in this welcome call. The purpose of this call was to establish a positive connection with the respondent to encourage high response rates during the endline survey..."
A Field Experiment among Filipino Migrant Workers in the UAE.pdf