The importance of survey research cannot be understated in a campaign.  Campaigns are essentially blind and guessing what messages work without investing in survey research. Magellan research provides clients effective message development and complete understanding of the political environment among critical subgroups of voters. Magellan Data and Mapping Strategies offers both live interview and automated touch tone survey research services to our clients. We began offering automated touch tone survey services in 2008 to meet the needs of our clients with limited budgets.

Magellan’s Approach to Survey Research
Magellan adheres to Registration Based Sampling (RBS) methodology for all our political survey research work, rather than the Random Digit Dialing (RDD) method.  We believe that RBS is superior to RDD because we know we are interviewing households that contain registered voters, we are assured we are calling within the district, and by using our own national Magellan voter file we know the sample is current.  The advantage of RDD is that randomly selected blocks of phone numbers will yield unlisted telephone numbers.  Despite this advantage over RBS, RDD has problems in ensuring you are actually calling within the target district, and that you are actually talking to a household with a voter.  We are not saying that RDD is an unreliable sampling methodology by any means, we just believe RBS sampling is superior, especially when the voter lists we use for our sample were created by our own Voter File Division within Magellan.

It’s the Subgroups of Voters that MATTER to a Campaign
Magellan’s philosophy to survey research is to keep it simple, efficient, and maximize the total number of interviews within the budget.  Exactly what does that mean for our clients?  It means you will not be paying Magellan to conduct a survey to determine why “college educated” voters won’t vote for a Republican.  It means our clients will have the information they need among the core voting demographics of district including age, gender, party (if applicable), race, geography, or census demographics.  In short, if we can’t quantify or aggregate a subgroup of voters from our own voter file, then we won’t waste our client’s time and money researching that group.

Our survey research provides information to our clients so that they can execute a campaign plan and perform effective message delivery and execute effective voter contact programs.  Understanding voter opinion among core demographics is what matters the most to a campaign, so they can communicate effectively, and deliver messages that move and persuade voters to their candidate’s point of view. �

Why Magellan Survey Research is More Cost Effective than Other Polling Firms
Simply put, our surveys cost less than other Republican polling firms because we don’t have to pay sample costs or data processing costs.  Sampling is not cheap and the client ends up paying for it.  A researcher can expect to dial through 20 to 25 times the desired completed number of interviews.  For example, to complete a 300N survey, a researcher will need 7,500 unique phone numbers, (300N x 25).  Companies that sell samples charge 8 cents per phone number, thus 7,500 unique phone numbers costs $600.  Since Magellan is in the voter file business, we don’t have to pay for sample and can pass that savings on to our clients.

Magellan reduces survey costs by compiling survey responses data in house.  Our polling project managers use statistical software to run unlimited cross tabs, while other polling firms outsource their data processing for a cost of $500 to $800.  We could charge our clients a markup for these fees, but do not.  We are more interested in providing our clients as much information as possible so they can make better decisions, run a more effective campaign, and put more resources into message delivery rather than survey research.

Automated Survey Research Services
Automated survey research is a reliable alternative to live interview survey research if campaign funds are limited.  Magellan has fielded more than 300 automated surveys since January of 2008.  We apply the same survey methodology that we use for live survey research.  The advantages of automated survey research over live interviewing methods are that automated surveys are incredibly inexpensive, can be fielded very quickly (within an hour), and yield a significantly larger number of interviews. (800N to 1,000N)

The large number of interviews yielded from an automated survey is a tremendous benefit to the researcher because it allows for higher confidence levels among smaller subgroups of voters.  For example, a 300N live interview benchmark survey of a Congressional District that is 33% Republican, 33% Democrat and 33% independent will yield 100 interviews among each party.  If the critical swing vote is among independent men or women, the survey will have interviewed only 50 independent men and 50 independent women.  Assumptions based on the 50 interviews will yield a margin of error equal to 14%, an uncomfortable MOE when making such critical decisions.

In contrast, an automated benchmark survey, in the same Congressional District that yields 800 interviews will produce 264 interviews within each party.  Using the same example as before, the number of independent men or women interviewed is 132 within each group.  The margin of error decreases from 14% to 8.5%, yielding a much more acceptable range for the researcher to make assumptions from the survey.