CQC Online Community Recruitment

The Brief

On-going three-monthly recruitment of a representative sample of 100 members of the public and management of incentive payments for giving their views through a private online community.

The requirement

We require an external supplier who can recruit and incentivise a representative sample of people to engage in community activities.

We would like this sample to be re-freshed every three months in order to prevent people becoming ‘CQC experts’ that are no longer representative of the general public in terms of their awareness and understanding of our work.

We would look to recruit a minimum of 100 members of the public per 3 month cycle for a contract period of 12 months.

We also want the external supplier to manage incentive payments for members. We currently pay members £2.50 per ‘task’ they complete which is provided in high-street vouchers. Currently participants would complete up to 5 ‘tasks’ during their three month participation in the community.

We are looking for a mix of people as follows

• 30% ‘general public’
• 30% current users of general healthcare services
• 30% current users of social care services or carers of someone using social care
• 10% current users of mental healthcare services or carers of someone using mental healthcare services.

Within these categories, we would specifically look to know if any of the following groups are represented for internal reporting purposes:

• carers
• people with long term conditions
• volunteers (any)
• pregnant or mothers with young children
• member of a statutory organisation (i.e. Local Healthwatch)

Day-to-day content management is managed by CQC’s Public Engagement Team, however, we would look to the supplier to provide guidance / updates on;

• maintaining high engagement rates (based on feedback from the sample)
• issues people are having which is preventing them from responding to tasks

We would also look to the supplier to provide innovative solutions to ensure a minimum number of responses is achieved per task.

The limitations of our current technical solution means that CQC will have to manually bulk upload a .CSV Excel sheet which includes the email addresses of the full sample in order to activate their participation on the site. This will then trigger an automated email from the online community to the respondent. As a consequence, we would expect to receive this file from the supplier three days before the start of each 3 month-cycle.

At the termination of each three month cycle, CQC will delete the details of participants from the community after incentivised period is terminated. However we wish to work with the supplier to encourage participants to remain on the community without being incentivised. But if members do not want to remain, their details are deleted in line with data protection requirements.