Dear members,

We at Toluna believe that every opinion counts, so we help companies anywhere in the world make clear business decisions by bringing brands and people together via the world’s largest social voting community.

We would like to take a few minutes to give you more insight into our business model and how we generally use the data we collect.

What is Toluna’s business?

Toluna invites thousands of members to answer surveys everyday on a wide array of subjects. The purpose of these surveys is to collect your opinions about the products and services of large consumer brands, your habits as a consumer, or about the world you live in.  Your opinion will have a direct impact on companies and how they market, distribute or advertise new products and services to consumers like you.

Why does Toluna ask for personal information such as name and address?

We ask for personal information such as your name, address, gender, birthday and employment status to better match you with the appropriate market research projects. This information is also used for the purposes of incentive fulfillment so that we may send your reward to the appropriate recipient address.

Other personal information that you may be asked to provide to us is solely for the purpose of building and operating a worldwide proprietary database of panelists, in order to conduct market research studies on that basis and we provide your responses to our surveys on to our clients in anonymized and aggregated form.

Why does Toluna ask so many questions in surveys?

This is because some surveys are looking for a very specific group of people who meet a very narrow set of demographic criteria. Sometimes, determining whether someone qualifies for a survey takes just a few questions, other times it may take more questions.

Why does Toluna keep asking the same questions in almost every survey?

Toluna’s profiling process is continuous — the objective being to have broad and current attributes on each member. Our clients make marketing decisions based on responses from our members in their surveys so we must implement strict quality controls to make sure you are part of the target the client is looking for. The questions we ask at the beginning of each survey may seem repetitive but are necessary to ensure the integrity of the survey sample.

Who are Toluna’s clients? What do they want?

Our clients include market research agencies, large corporations, brands, public organizations, PR agencies and even individuals. Their interests cover all industry sectors, but they are all looking to get honest opinions on their products and services or to understand consumer motivations and habits. The results of our surveys help our clients to better understand consumers’ needs in order to make their products, services or advertising more relevant.

How does Toluna use the data we collect?

Toluna takes strict measures to ensure every aspect of your information is kept secure.

Toluna only provides information to clients in an anonymized and aggregated form for use in market research and for the client’s own internal purposes.

Toluna does not use Direct Marketing and will never share your data with telemarketers or ad agencies for promotion and targeting purposes.

You have the right to gain access to your data and correct it.  In order to access this data you may either login to your Toluna account or contact us at privacyna@toluna.com.  For more information on how to access, update or delete your personal data on Toluna, please read our Privacy Policy.

What happens to my answers when I don’t qualify for a survey?
When you do not qualify for a survey, your responses cannot be used in the final research findings, and therefore are never transferred to our clients.  Likewise, Toluna will never use or transfer these responses for internal use.  As the information you entered cannot be used for our client’s research, most times no reward will be issued for an incomplete study.

We hope that this post answered some common questions about Toluna.  For more information, check out our FAQ’s, or for account questions, contact our support team. Read More…