The Active Lives survey was hosted using our global Dimensions platform in Rackspace, a managed hosting facility. The security features offered by Rackspace, and Ipsos are listed below:
At Rackspace:
- Rackspace has SAS 70 type II and Safe Harbor certifications;
- The servers and network infrastructure are physically located in England;
- The servers and network components are fully redundant;
- Rackspace guarantees recovery of hardware failures within one hour.
At Ipsos:
- All access to Dimensions’ questionnaires and data was password protected. Only a small number of online survey experts had access.
- Survey data and any respondent personal information were stored in separate databases.
- Penetration testing was carried out on our installation to check that there were no problems.
- Paper questionnaires were stored securely and destroyed at the end of the project.
Survey URL
When deciding on a suitable URL for the survey, we had to strike a balance between several factors:
- Availability: We had to find an address that was not already in use. This ruled out options such as ALS.com, ALS.co.uk and ActiveLives.com;
- Brevity: We had to choose an address that was short enough for people to remember as we thought this would improve accessibility and would help maximise response rate;
- Engagement/appeal: We wanted the URL to give some indication of the content of the survey as well as linking to the overall branding, the theory being that this would help promote engagement with the survey for all types of respondents.
After considering all our options, we opted for http://www.activelivessurvey.org/ as it was the most suitable option based on the criteria listed above.
Based on internal timings, we estimated that the questionnaire would take around 15 minutes to complete.
The median actual completion time was 12 minutes 22 seconds for group 1 compared with 14 minutes and 39 seconds for group 2.
The timings data is calculated as the difference between the survey start and finish times. This does not include respondents who exit the survey and return to it at a later time.