Hi everyone, my name is Anya Biryukova, and at ACF I organize our sociology team.
I would never have written a post here, but we now have a rule at ACF: if you don’t write a post for Collective Navalny, it’s ~~corrective labor~~ a week of office duty.
I also wouldn’t have put my photo here, but Navalny insists on “personalization” and says, “ACF’s sponsors are people, and they should see whose salary they’re paying.”
So yes, you’re paying my salary, and below I’ll explain what for.
Our sociology team can do lots of different things: — we conduct field surveys with paper questionnaires, — surveys using electronic tablets, — once we even ran an exit poll (and got the results in real time), — panel surveys (to measure the effectiveness of Popular Politics) and — every week in our office we conduct phone surveys (nationwide across Russia, or focused on a region or city).
We’ve already completed six phone surveys and are starting our seventh this week. We’ve called across Russia twice, and we’ve also called Novosibirsk and Moscow.
We publish some of the results (like this survey about Crimea), while some surveys are conducted for internal use, because ~~voice~~ knowledge is our weapon.
The results of those surveys are kept in a special sealed cabinet at ACF, and only people with an official stamped document can see them.
Volunteers who help with these “closed surveys” receive a gold star, respect, honor, and the right to learn the breakdown for any two questions in the questionnaire.
When Alexei wrote about ACF opening a call center for phone surveys, almost 400 people signed up here.
Let me tell you what happens after you click the “submit” button.
After you sign up as an ACF volunteer sociologist, a kitten is born somewhere in the world, flowers bloom, a rainbow appears in the sky, and the wonderful fairy Galya calls you to tell you about our survey plans for the coming week.
(This is Galya)
Together with Galya, you choose a time that works for you (for Moscow, we call from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m.), and when we conduct surveys across Russia, we sometimes start as early as 8 a.m.
We always recommend that newcomers choose half a shift, four hours at most; experienced volunteers often call for the whole day.
At the start of a shift, we either hold a group training session if there are lots of newcomers, or train first-timers individually if the shift is made up mostly of experienced volunteers. This is what the workstation looks like. ~~Nothing unnecessary~~
To start calling, you just pick up the handset and automatic dialing begins according to the selected region and the set proportion of landline and mobile numbers.
In our first surveys, one phone dialed one randomly generated number at a time. It took forever—5 to 6 minutes before the first successful connection—because about half the numbers don’t exist at all, some mobile phones are switched off, some people don’t answer, and we have to wait through six rings.
Volunteers had time to read their entire Twitter feed, and over a full shift they could get through a couple of books and write the first chapter of their thesis. So now one volunteer calls 10 numbers at once and rarely waits more than a minute to hear that first “Hello.”
Then we go carefully through the questionnaire, the possible skips and branching, the pros, the cons, and the pitfalls. The introductory and closing sections stay the same, while the middle part (about 10–12 questions) changes from survey to survey (surprise!). After reviewing the questionnaire and the rules for conducting interviews, we move on to the ethics section, or “what you must not do during an interview.”
Other than reading the questions word for word, pretty much everything is forbidden. We don’t share our own views, we don’t get into arguments, and we gracefully sidestep respondents’ questions like: “I voted for Putin, he’s a cool guy—what do you think of him?”
(Here’s a screenshot from the training presentation showing HOW NOT TO DO IT)
Even though this is not easy work, and sometimes genuinely hard work, we’ve never had a case where a volunteer failed to learn how to conduct quality interviews by the end of a shift. After a couple of hours of calling, a volunteer’s work is indistinguishable from that of “professional interviewers.” We also have little cheat sheets that come to the rescue in difficult moments.
During a calling session, our call center looks like this:
Two days a week we rest, and then silence falls over the call center. ACF staff get sad because they can’t pretend they’ve come in to listen to volunteers “talking to the country” (when really they just want to swipe a mandarin).
**You can sign up for our dream sociology team here. **We’ll find a time that works for you, even if you can only spare a couple of hours after work, only on Tuesdays, and only during a waning moon.
Come join us.