Postbox – The Forgotten Medium

• The only method currently available which can guarantee access to every street and every building in the country and is privacy compliant is an “area letter box drop” (ALD).
• This technique can be tuned to deliver up to a 20% response rate though a combination of incentives and follow-ups however this would not be the usual level of expenditure.
• Compared with conventional methods it has wider coverage and is substantially cheaper.
• ALD ensures adequate numbers of young people are in the sample and that adequate and representative numbers of upper and upper middle socio-economic households are interviewed along with ethnic households.
• The survey can be done in the respondent’s time frame not the interviewer’s.
• In areas of low literacy then interviewers help respondents to complete their questionnaire however, in areas of high literacy respondents complete the survey themselves. (See Table Below)
• The most important survey in any country is the Census - a self completion survey.