Contribute allows people to take surveys for charity and a chance to win a sweepstakes prize. We believe that by offering these non-cash incentives, we limit problems such as satisficing and encourage respondents to provide honest, thoughtful opinions.

We recruit members from a diverse population of millions of people who take SurveyMonkey surveys every month. For example, after completing a survey, respondents are redirected to a page that may feature an advertisement for Contribute.

After signing up, each member fills out a profile, which allows us to gather a wide variety of profile attributes, like demographic questions (gender, age, region, etc.) as well as some other targeting characteristics you might care about (cell phone usage, job type, and more). Respondents are targeted based on the information they provide in their profile. You choose from these attributes to send your survey to a targeted audience. The more variables or criteria you target, the more it constricts the population we can use to build your sample.

We'll email respondents who match your targeting criteria a unique link to your survey. Our system selects a random group from the SurveyMonkey Contribute member base who match the demographic targeting criteria you requested. We use a standard email template to notify respondents that they have a new survey to take. It's not possible to customize the invitation email.

As with most online sampling, respondents have Internet access and voluntarily joined a program to take surveys, so they're representative of an online population.

We automatically balance results according to census data of age and gender, while location tends to balance out naturally. Balancing precision and granularity improves as the number of responses increases. We're not able to guarantee any specific balancing on self-serve projects.

If you need a particular breakdown between particular demographics, try our custom balancing option.

You can also make multiple Audience purchases for your survey, one for each specific demographic you need—all the results will be recorded in the same place so you can easily filter and compare. For example, create one collector and buy responses from only males, then create another collector and buy responses from only females.

To buy responses for a survey in your account:

1. Go to the Collect Responses section of the survey you're buying responses for.
2. Create a new collector and choose Buy Responses (if this collector type isn't available in your account, visit the Audience Marketing page and click Start Now).
3. Select the number of completed responses you need. You need to purchase a minimum of 50 completed responses.
4. Under Location, you'll see United States. Filter by regions, states, or major metropolitan areas, or leave the box blank to target respondents from all over the United States. To buy responses from outside the US, see SurveyMonkey Audience Global Panel.
5. Choose the rest of your Demographics.
6. Read the info below on High Priority Status, Incidence Rate, or Custom Balancing, if these apply to you.
7. Review Your Order on the right side of the page. Hover over the question mark icon next to Total Cost to see a detailed pricing breakdown.
8. Click Proceed to Checkout. You can pay using a credit or debit card or with Audience Credits. Then, confirm your order.

Once you complete your payment, we email survey invitations to respondents who match your targeting criteria, so you won't be able to edit your order or change your targeting criteria after purchase. Additionally, it's not possible to customize the invitation email.

High Priority Status speeds up the completion of your Audience project by a business day or more. SurveyMonkey Contribute respondents are paired with available High Priority Status projects before they're prompted with other open Audience projects.

To complete your project before the estimated delivery date displayed in your order, enable High Priority Status before you proceed to checkout. Once a project has started, you can't edit the priority status.

Eligibility

Projects are eligible for High Priority Status if:

• You're purchasing respondents from the United States.
• Your targeting criteria is broad.
• Your incidence rate is greater than 50%.
• You need less than 3,000 completed responses.
• There are currently fewer than 5 live High Priority Status projects currently running or no more than 10,800 collective responses needed.

Enabling High Priority Status

To enable High Priority Status:

1. In Your Order, click High Priority: Get Results by Date.
2. In the pop-up window, check the box to Enable High Priority Status for the added price per response. If your project is not eligible, you'll see an error message.
3. Click Save.

Disabling High Priority Status

To disable High Priority Status:

1. In Your Order, click Disable High Priority Status.
2. In the pop-up window, un-check the box to Enable High Priority Status.
3. Click Save.

If your survey contains disqualification logic, you need to select an estimated incidence rate.The incidence rate you select affects the number of people we send your survey to. Lower incidence rates cost more per response since we have to send your survey to more respondents to find enough people who qualify.

You only need to choose an incidence rate if your survey contains disqualification logic. If your survey doesn't have disqualification logic, the incidence rate dropdown menu is greyed out and incidence doesn't affect your cost.

Custom balancing is available for both age and gender—you can choose the distribution of completed responses you want from each gender or age group you're targeting. For example, get 80% of your completed responses from female respondents and 20% from male respondents.

To use custom balancing:

1. Under Basic Demographics, click Age or Gender.
2. Choose the Custom option. Any previously selected age or gender criteria is removed so you can use the custom balancing tool.
3. For Age, click Edit and enter the minimum and maximum age range for each group you're looking to survey. You can target 2–8 different age groups. Next enter the percentage of complete responses you want from each group (the percentages must total 100%). Each age range should be 5 years or more (18–23 works, but 18–21 doesn't), and age groups can't overlap (you can't have both 18-30 and 25-35 as age groups). Click Save once you're done.
4. For Gender, use the slider scale to pick the percentage of responses you want from males and females.
5. Take a look at your Project Details on the right side of the page to review your custom balancing selections and the additional cost per response.

Completed Responses

Due to the nature of the system, the variability of response rates, and natural margin of error, we can't guarantee that you'll get the exact number of completed responses that you specified per gender and age. There's a fault tolerance of ±5 responses per gender group and age group.

Using Both Age and Gender Balancing

You can use both custom age and gender balancing at the same time. When you do that, we combine the percentage of both gender and age balancing to determine the distribution of responses from each gender against each age group.

Let's say you're buying 500 completed responses and choose the following custom gender and age balancing settings:

• Gender: Female 75%, Male 25%
• Age: 18–29: 30%, When you do that, we combine the percentage of both gender and age balancing to determine the number of completed responses your project will receive.: 70%

With these custom gender and age balancing options, the system calculates how many responses each gender + age group will get like this:

• Completed Responses (500) * Female Responses (75%) * 18-29 Age Group (30%) = 113 responses
• Completed Responses (500) * Female Responses (75%) * 30–39 Age Group (70%) = 263 responses
• Completed Responses (500) * Male Responses (25%) * 18-29 Age Group (30%) = 38 responses
• Completed Responses (500) * Male Responses (25%) * 30–39 Age Group (70%) = 88 responses

You can create multiple collectors for a survey to get more responses. Get responses for different demographics by buying multiple Targeted Audience Collectors. Or send the same survey to your own respondents by creating more collector types—like a Web Link or Email Invitation—for free. All responses are stored in the Analyze Results section of the survey, and you can filter results by the different collectors.

The number of questions in a survey is directly correlated to how many people finish the survey—longer surveys take more to complete and can cause respondents to exit or abandon the survey. Therefore, longer surveys cost more per response since we have to send the survey to more respondents to find enough people who will finish.

Because survey length affects the number of respondents we can find, there's a 50-question maximum for SurveyMonkey Audience surveys.

Each targeting option you select (like respondent location, gender, income, etc.) costs an additional amount per response, depending on how common or difficult it is to find among our available respondents.