A LONDON-based company that aims to harness the power of automated fax
delivery technology in opinion polling has Britain鈥檚 Market Research Society
(MRS) up in arms.
Instead of going out into the street and asking 1000 people what they think
about a topic, Fax Polling Associates (FPA) can transmit many thousands of
questionnaires to unidentified fax machines, asking recipients to complete and
return them. The MRS complains that the method has no validity, and objects that
the company has set up premium phone lines to earn money from every fax
returned.
There are at least 1.5 million fax machines in Britain. British Telecom
provides no directory of fax numbers, but FPA has compiled its own database of
830 000 unidentified numbers. 鈥淧eople appear and offer to sell us lists,鈥� says
Gordon Ritchie, FPA鈥檚 chief executive.
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FPA has now acquired a hundred personal computers, each fitted with a fax
modem. They can work through the database of fax numbers, trying each one up to
five times if it fails to answer.
To demonstrate the value of fax polling, FPA recently sent out a form to all
of the numbers on its database bearing the question: 鈥淒o you want Britain to
stay in Europe, or get out?鈥� Around 70 000 people replied, says Ritchie, 72 per
cent saying that they wanted Britain to leave the European Union. The nearest
comparable conventional survey, published on 17 April in The Times,
revealed a 50:50 split.
The MRS argues that FPA鈥檚 poll is meaningless because the company has no
information about the people who responded, and whether they are representative
of the country as a whole. 鈥淭he system cannot produce a result which stands up
to scrutiny,鈥� says Alan Morris, acting director-general of the MRS.
But Ritchie is unbowed. He blames the discrepancy between the FPA and The
Times polls on the adjustments used by pollsters to compensate for any bias
in political views among a small sample of people. 鈥淚 believe their weighting is
飞谤辞苍驳.鈥�
FPA is now trying to interest a major national newspaper in its services. At
no cost, it is offering to send out 30 000 faxes, with an expected response from
at least 1000 people. It wants the newspaper to conduct its own conventional
poll on the same question with a sample of 1000 people, and compare and publish
the results.
FPA is not a member of the MRS. But if it were, says Morris, 鈥渄isciplinary
measures would undoubtedly be taken鈥�. Reply numbers used in FPA鈥檚 initial survey
used premium rate lines, costing the caller about 拢1 to return the
form鈥攖hree-quarters of which went to FPA. The MRS does not allow its
members to make money from people responding to surveys.