How to find fame with a poll

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 1, 1994 by Drew Reid Kerr

Surveys and polls can be great publicity devices; you just need a little imagination, careful planning and a bit of luck.

In the great arsenal of public relations weapons for magazines, one of the most powerful is the survey, or poll. The media seem to have an unquenchable thirst for those magical statistics that are like a mirror reflecting how people think. Virtually any magazine, from Restaurant News to Guitar World, can do a survey. But you can't just run out, ask people a bunch of questions, tally up the answers, and spit out the results in a press release. Like an ace detective, you have to ask the right people the right questions.

If you are thinking about having your magazine do a survey, the first question to ask yourself is, will the results be newsworthy? Will they tie in with current or future events in the news, or shed light fairly on the way people think? Surveys can tackle the most serious subjects, such as crime, politics and the economy, or the lighter side of life, such as food preferences, sleeping habits and secrets. Or you can come up with something clever that combines the heavy and the light, such as a Redbook survey during the last Presidential campaign that asked women to rank the candidates purely by their looks. Timing is important. Often it pays to look ahead to holidays, seasons and special events when selecting a subject. For example, you might consider a poll about gift-giving for a fall issue, something political during election time, or a travel survey released around Memorial Day, just before the summer vacation season kicks off.

Choose your weapon

Surveys fall into two broad categories: the reader poll and the scientific poll. And because each carries a different weight in the eyes of the media, your choice of polling method is extremely important and could well be the deciding point in just how well accepted your poll results will be.

When you do a reader poll, the survey goes only to your readers. This is true whether the poll takes the form of 900-number call-backs, or responses mailed or faxed back to the magazine. Just how many responses you get is a gamble. It could be zero, it could be thousands, but the return rate is generally low. For example, if TV Guide gets 65,000 responses from a reader poll, that's less than 1 percent of its 14 million readers. By definition, this kind of survey represents only what your readers who actually bothered to respond think--not what the country thinks. Because of this, reader polls are sometimes viewed suspiciously by the media. On the other hand, reader polls often won't cost you a thing.

A scientific poll employs correct statistical methods to sample a representative portion of the population--which means the results are scientifically accurate. Doing a scientific poll often entails hiring a research firm or persuading the company's in-house research department to go "into the field," make the calls, do the analysis and present the results. Needless to say, a scientific poll can cost money, but it will also be more readily accepted by the media. For some press insurance and the chance to create a poll that will be "evergreen," you may decide that it is worth investing in a scientific poll. If you do, you should know something about the numbers involved. For a national, single-gender poll, for example, you must produce a minimum of 500 randomly selected men or women, according to Ethel Klein, president of New York-based EDK Associates, which conducts projects for Redbook and Working Woman. A 20-question poll of this type costs between $12,000 and $20,000, depending on the research firm you hire.

If you want a double-gender poll, "1,000 is preferred, but you can get away with 800," says Klein. The costs involved for this type of poll range between $30,000 and $50,000 for 60 questions.

If news is breaking and you want to capture the moment, a quick-and-dirty, 10-question overnight national random poll of 1,000 men and women will cost you between $10,000 and $15,000. What you get for this price is design of the questionnaire, the computer-generated random sample of listed and unlisted telephone numbers, collection of data, the building of a dataset (floppy disc of poll data), and an analysis and report based on the findings. Start to finish should take you anywhere from three weeks to one month.

Ask me no questions ...

Once you've made your choice of poll, the next step is to devise your questions. Good questions meet two criteria: They have not been asked before, and the answers should teach us something new.

Being on the right wavelength with your readers helps when you are constructing a poll. Klein advises her customers to keep their audiences in mind and to be "clear about whether they themselves know about the subject."

When Klein began working on the 1992 Redbook Motherhood Poll with editor in chief (and mother of two) Ellen Levine, they realized that they were tackling a highly over-researched area. So they approached it by asking themselves, "What do we think we know about motherhood, and is it true?"