The task was to recruit consumers who would be accompanied by 3 clients to visit mobile phone shops and assess shopping habits.

On paper, this seemed easy to execute but when the client chose to carry this out in the centre of London, in the middle of the day, we soon realised that this ‘easy recruiting’ job was in fact ‘not so easy’.

In order to ensure smooth running of the project, one of our in-house project managers ventured out into the field to meet and greet the respondents on the ground and to act as an on-street host while the clients accompanied store visits.

This meant that we were able to overcome any delays in the schedule and succeeded in completing all interviews during the stated timeframe.

Field Scope will go above and beyond to make sure that your project runs smoothly in the field.

Our goal was to recruit 40 mums and kids to attend a central facility day.

Children needed to be under the age of 16 and had to be screened (parental consent given) before participation. The study ran for 1 week and required extreme attention to detail due to the volume of infant respondents participating.

The drop-out rate is always high on such studies and we had to ensure back-up parents and kids were on standby.

Also, school times were a challenge to get around and we had to organise taxis and transportation where needed in order to achieve the required amount of attendance.

FSI handled the recruiting and provided field support throughout the project.

Students are generally straightforward to recruit but when the client’s brief states that they are to be recruited during the exam term to take part in a 10-minute online survey via iPads, then this becomes a completely different challenge all together.

Once again, the need to think outside the box was mandatory.

We tried Red Bull incentives but soon realised that the young rascals didn’t fancy a set of wings, Snickers bars were just too nutty, free bottles of water were just too boring.

At last, we had a Eureka moment and realised that a free cold beer was just what we needed to get the numbers.

We completed 300 interviews with plenty of time to spare.

We had to recruit contract customers having a new smartphone. The goal was to research the purchase journey.

The client required regular updates, and in addition to the recruitment screening, we provided photographs of every respondent holding and interacting with the smart phone in situ.

The client conducted the interviews so this was a recruit only project for us.

A leading car manufacturer asked us to target respondents who had purchased a new vehicle in the last 12 months.

The aim of the research was to explore features of the new satellite navigation system that was being designed for a specific line of vehicles.

We had a couple of challenges during the recruitment process.

First of all, respondents of this type don’t always sit on panels. So, we approached them via social media, touching base with owner groups.

Our in-house recruiters went through specialized websites where people discussed cars as well as car blogs where people interested in cars went to read the reviews of certain models. For validation purposes, we asked each respondent to provide ownership paperwork.

Other challenges were the sample size and type of survey.

We had to recruit 12 car owners to attend a 3-hour workshop. Obviously, this had to be done during the weekend when people don’t work.

However, nobody is eager to spend their weekend participating in a survey, especially a 3-hour long survey. So we had to offer proper incentives which we did.

FSI managed to overcome these challenges and provide the client with the sufficient number of respondents by the agreed deadline.