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April 16, 2005

Appeal Tactics

As of today, I've received 16 responses from people willing to help me out with my project, and I'm extremely grateful to all of them. I took Dionne's advice from class and capitalized on the fact that I was a pitiful overworked graduate student desperate for respondents (uncomfortably close to the truth), and I think that definitely earned me sympathy points, as did my decision to personalize each email to describe what I found most commendable about each of my subjects' blogs. One of my respondents even called me on it, saying:

"Excellent mix of flattery, salesmanship, bonding (via Singapore) and appeal to my sympathy for penurious graduate students. And, as a former penurious graduate student, I can sympathize."

I think it also helped that I gave them my full name and Professor Norvell's email contact information for verification purposes. I have a stat counter on this site that allows me to see how people get to my site, and after I sent out my preliminary emails I found that a lot of people had googled "fiona chan harvard" and this blog came up as one of the hits, so hopefully it helped allay any fears that I might be some random spammer struck with the brilliant idea of posing as a student researcher.

So I finalized the questionnaire today and sent it out to all of the 16 respondents, and hopefully I'll be getting answers soon. I foresee the need to conduct some follow-up interviews because I was forced to make the first questionnaire as broad as I could in order to cover all the bases. At least it's progress, though!

Posted by chan at April 16, 2005 10:56 PM