High Praise for Comscore's Green Recruiting Efforts
As Vice President of Panel Development at Comscore, I frequently get asked about how we are able to build such a large diverse global panel of more than 2 million Internet users, which serves as the foundation of all of our products and services, including the recently announced MMX 360 panel-centric hybrid measurement platform. The answer is simple enough: through a large network of partner sites and our own sites, we offer a widely appealing suite of value propositions to panelists in exchange for allowing us to passively observe and anonymously gather their Internet behavior. More succinctly put – we give them free stuff. We believe we’ve developed a diverse portfolio of free stuff and, while each individual offer may not appeal to everyone, there is truly ‘something for everyone.’ This allows us to recruit robust samples from every demographic segment and ensures that our panel is representative of the Internet population at large.
Our portfolio of offerings includes a variety of PC utilities, productivity tools, desktop personalization downloads, digital media applications and entertainment applications, but we also provide incentives that are a bit more altruistic in nature. A recent post in the Gaia Public Relations blog highlighted the many valuable member benefits we offer, with a particular focus on our ‘green’ efforts with PermissionResearch, one of our many recruiting platforms. The author noted:
It was wonderful to see a front page link [on the Comscore website] for the corporate social responsibility (CSR) program, as CSR often gets buried in secondary pages. It appears as though Comscore, “…has partnered with Trees for the Future to plant a tree for each new person who joins PermissionResearch (a division of Comscore) through the Comscore Trees for Knowledge campaign.”
The cornerstone of our green recruiting efforts is the Trees For Knowledge program. Through our partnership with the Trees for the Future organization, we have committed to plant trees on behalf of Internet users who join the Comscore panel through the Trees For Knowledge campaign. So far, we have made contributions to support the planting of more than 1.8 million trees worldwide. And while the number of trees is quite impressive, it’s not all about getting more trees to take CO2 out of the air and dump more O2 into the air. It’s also about reversing the effects that deforestation has had on climate change, soil erosion, habitat destruction for plants and animals, and the disruption of water systems that have devastated areas around the world. The goal, as outlined in the Trees for the Future mission statement, is to “help people in developing countries improve their rural livelihoods through the introduction of environmentally sustainable land management projects focused on beneficial tree planting.” It is not too late to make a difference and reverse these effects. As the Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.”
We’re both excited and proud to sponsor such a program. We’ve created an appealing offer for the Comscore global panel community that at the same time has benefitted the larger global community, of which we are all members.