Those of you who have used Mobile Researcher commercially are probably familiar with the billing model which has been in place for some time now. For those who haven’t, essentially the cost charged per response is based on the number of fields which were prompted and captured during the conduction of a survey (an instruction is also considered a field, even though no data is collected).

In this model, only fields which are actually presented are billed for. For example: If, in a 25 question survey, a fieldworker was presented with an instruction and 9 questions (and not all 25 questions due to skip logic), 10 fields (9+1) would be billed for when receiving the response.

This model ensures that you only pay for the fields actually shown to the fieldworker.

What’s changed?

We’ve now taken this a step further and have upgraded our billing system to only bill for questions where a response is captured. As a result, if a fieldworker doesn’t enter a value for a question (only possible if you specify the question as optional of course) or if the field is an instruction, no credit will be deducted for that field.

We’ve implemented this new billing model for a few reasons:

1. Although we really feel that Mobile Researcher is an affordable solution when compared with just about every other option available, we wanted allow our users to be able to directly justify costs with the number of data elements actually captured.
2. We wanted to encourage the use of instructions where appropriate to improve the layout and clarity of our users’ surveys. With instructions now carrying no cost, hopefully this will achieve this goal.

This update will take immediate effect on all accounts – no action is required by existing users.

Thanks again for your continued support.