Inspired Opinions Review: Is the Schlesinger Associates Community Legit?

Inspired Opinions may not be the most sought after online survey panel out there. But it surely has inspired enough interest from SurveySatrap readers to want to find out more about it. Here is my review of this site!

 

InspiredOpinions.com

Schlesinger Associates is the company behind this survey panel. The company has been a market leader in the provision of market research opportunities for the past 40 years.

With offices set up in London, Frankfurt, Saint Louis, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin and many more across the world, they specialize in and commission market study for corporate clients.

The firm is very well-known in the market research industry and is a member of some of the most respected research organizations such as QRCA (Qualitative Research Consultants), Marketing Research Association, Usability Professionals’ Association and CASRO (Council of American Survey Research Centers).

Unfortunately, Inspired Opinions as a whole does not get featured in the Better Business Bureau, even though the holding company, Schlesinger Associates, does. But it seems like individual branches of the company (based on the location of the branch) do have their own profiles.

When you consider all these profiles collectively, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that this is a well established and entirely legit research company. There is no room for scam here.

Becoming a Panelist

Minimum joining age to this survey panel is 18. Registration is straightforward and would not take more than a few minutes. The company does not charge you for sign-up, and there is no intention to sell you anything or sell your personal information.

On the registration page, you will be required to enter some basic information about yourself before the system prompts you to create your login ID and password.

Upon the completion of the registration, the company will attempt to correlate your interest and lifestyle to their research subjects stored inside their massive database. Whenever there is a match, Inspired Opinions will get in touch either through phone or e-mail for further qualification process.

Schlesinger Associates has a reputation of offering very well paid focus groups. This has been the biggest incentive for me to register as a member here.

You can think of focus group as the mother of all paid surveys. Nothing else pays more than it does. Any serious and self-respecting survey panelists would have focus groups as part of their strategy.

It is easy to see why. They pay $100 or more for questionnaire that takes an hour or two to tackle.

The amount of topics varies a lot. But don’t equate these as some form of nerdy scientific projects. Rather they are about the experiences and perceptions we have on products that we commonly use or those we are ready to give it a try.

 

Getting Paid

Like many other survey panels such as Zoompanel, Inspired Opinions uses points-based system to reward their participants and each point is backed up by a cash value. In this case, 100 points is equivalent to one dollar, 1000 points means $10, and it just goes on.

IP will not penalize you through points cancellation so long your membership status remains active. Active account member is defined as somebody has at least done one survey over the last 12 months.

There are many ways for you to accumulate opinion points; from typical surveys to focus groups, and right through to phone surveys.

Amazingly, even doing something as trivial as completing your personal profile and doing personal updates could also earn you points.

Redemption can happen when you get to 1000 points ($10). They allow you to exchange these points with Amazon.com gift cards. They are available in various denominations from $5 to $100, really dependent on how much you have at any given time. Of course you can go on collecting points for a huge redemption later.

 

My Review of Inspired Opinions

The survey invitations out from IP are really too measly for my liking. On average I get about 4-6 invitations every month.

Granted it is a legit company which pays you to participate in surveys, but these opportunities are too few and too far in between to create a meaningful income stream.

The bottom line is by joining Inspired Opinions you can count on it to make some extra cash, but stick to your day job to provide stable income.