oa Comparing Online Recruitment Strategies for Data Donation Studies

The collection of data donations holds great potential for making digital trace data accessible to communication research. However, a major challenge is the recruitment of participants who are willing to donate their data for research. Hence, this research report presents our experiences with different strategies used in one study to recruit citizens to donate their personal media usage data. Based on our experiences during a data donation study in which Google Search and YouTube usage histories were collected, we compare three different online recruitment channels—(a) an access panel, (b) social media advertisements, and (c) a data marketplace—in terms of five dimensions: (1) administrative effort, (2) setup effort, (3) participation rate, (4) costs, and (5) analytical considerations. Overall, participation rates were rather low across all recruitment channels. Nevertheless, access panels remain a viable option for recruiting data donors even if significantly lower response rates must be expected compared to survey studies. Furthermore, we see potential in recruiting data donors through online advertisements, especially if they can be targeted through mobile ads. By contrast, our experience with the data marketplace was discouraging.