Every two years, VetHelpDirect run a big survey of pet owners in the UK called the Communications Survey. And the 2021 survey has just gone live! We’d love it if as many pet owners as possible could complete it – and in this blog, I’m going to explain why.
What’s it for?
Our Communication Surveys are intended to help us to help vets communicate better with animal owners. For example, do cat owners prefer email newsletters compared to dog owners? Or are rabbit owners more likely to want to use video calls than cat owners? What about people who own exotic pets?
This year the survey is bigger than ever
That’s because of the pandemic. It’s made massive changes in the ways people work, live, and, yes, communicate. In addition, vet practices are increasingly short staffed, and more likely to turn to novel communication routes. So, we’ve teamed up with our friends and colleagues at VetsDigital to run a bumper survey that will help get to the bottom of what’s changed since 2019.
Why should I fill it in?
Well, ideally because it’ll be helpful for your vets! But we appreciate that it’s 15 minutes out of your (probably very) busy day. So there are two extra incentives:
Mission Rabies
Mission Rabies is a charity set up to help protect people and dogs from rabies. Operating mainly in India and East Africa, it provides dog rabies vaccines to animals across five countries.
For every completed survey, up to our target of 1000, we will donate 20p to Mission Rabies for their work this year.
Prize Draw
In addition, at the end of the survey you will have the chance to opt into to the Prize Draw – one person will be chosen at random to win £100 in Pets At Home vouchers.
What will happen to the information you collect?
All the information will be anonymised – we don’t ask for or take your address, name or even computer information (the IP address). The survey is handled for us by SurveyMonkey, and we’ve told them we want all the respondents to be anonymous.
We do ask for the first part of your postcode (so we can check we’ve got enough responses from different parts of the country), but that is optional and you don’t have to answer that question.
We also do ask for your email address if you want to be entered into the Prize Draw, but if you give us your email, that will be removed from the main data and stored separately, and only for the purposes you give us permission to use it for.
Will this be used to sell me stuff?
No. Actually, we couldn’t even if we wanted to (and we don’t sell stuff to the public as a company anyway). What it will do is hopefully help your vet to provide the services you want, better.
So please, do help us out! It should only take about 15 minutes, and will be really useful to your vets, and vet and pet owners across the UK.
If you have any other questions, please contact us, and one of our research team will get back to you!
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