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The events of 2020 were unlike any the globe has experienced before, with COVID-19 dominating lives around the world for most of the year. Individual’s routines have dramatically changed, and both global economies and individual finances have suffered due to the fallout from COVID-19. In the midst of all of this, in-person data collection methodologies were no longer feasible at a time when accurate, timely data was needed more than ever. This led to a surge in the need for remote research methodologies, both for studies that directly examined the impact of COVID-19 and for longer-term projects which were suddenly unable to conduct research through traditional methodologies. In countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, mobile-based methodologies such as Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing became the best way to gather insights from hard-to-reach populations.
GeoPoll has been building our mobile-based research platform for almost ten years, and as COVID-19 accelerated the need for remote solutions, our team rose to the challenge. We opened new call centers, expanded our global reach, and conducted over 4.4 million surveys on important topics including food security, the economic impacts of COVID-19, changes in consumer behavior, and more. Throughout this, we also made enhancements to several of our existing products, launched a brand new GeoPoll Application, added functionality to our CATI application, and created dashboards to better monitor data quality throughout the project lifecycle.
In addition to the studies we ran on COVID-19, we conducted studies on Kenya’s media landscape throughout the year, influencer marketing in Nigeria and Kenya, and the humanitarian crisis in Tigray, Ethiopia. We spoke to GeoPoll team members including Nicolette Lok, VP of Operations, Benard Okasi, Director of Research, and Wycliffe Litabalia, Survey Operations Manager, on what it takes to succeed in their line of work. And we continued to build our library of research content, writing articles on data weighting, sampling frames, and quantitative vs qualitative research.
As always, you can find all of GeoPoll’s studies on the GeoPoll blog, and our coronavirus-specific research in our COVID-19 resource portal. If you would like to learn more about GeoPoll’s capabilities conducting remote research in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, please contact us.