What's New in EFS Panel 7.0

EFS Panel 7.0 is the community edition. We've improved the powerful panelist administration, modern CMS, and automation capabilities, and added all standard features you might expect from a community panel.

Community Features in Detail

Panelist Profile

Member profiles and the ability to search for other members are among the most important characteristics of any type of online community.

Profiles are the online face of the members:

• They offer central access to all data available for a member which are of relevance for community life - be it a simple nick and avatar in an anonymous community, or detailed personal data, including self-descriptions and community ratings.
• Usually the members use their profiles to introduce themselves, beyond the minimum set of data necessary for registration and participation. E.g. they write short bios or upload personal pictures.

A search feature provides orientation in the community:

• Find and contact members which you have met e.g. in a chat of the community.
• Find members who share the same interests.
• To gain an overview on the composition of the community.

A variety of new tools and templates enable you to configure panelist profiles and search features, according to the needs of your panel community:

• You can define yourself which data should, in principle, be available for display and search.
• You can allow members to determine what is and is not displayed. This is of special importance with audience groups who have a strong interest in privacy or in countries with strict privacy laws.
• Panelist profiles, search form and results lists are set up by combining one single form and one single module. A variety of setting options guarantee flexibility: e.g. you can display data on the profile which are not included in search or results list.
• You can set up different types of profiles for the various language versions of a panel. Even in one single language version, you can work with several sets of profiles. If there is an expert group with an own forum among your panelists, you could, for example, use simple profiles with just a few personal data for the whole community, while the experts have more detailed profiles and search functions in their „private“ area.

Related to Panelist Profiles

• Panelist Ratings: By assigning points or other units of a social currency, the participants show sympathy or praise for each other.
• Display of Active Panelists: A frequenty-requested feature for community sites is a counter that shows which members are currently online. You can show the number of panelists, list them by name or show their profile pictures!

Panelist Blogs

Let panelists share their opinions within your online community. Panelist blogs are one of the most important novelties in EFS Panel 7.0

• Each panelist can have their own blog. Depending of the goals of your research, you can conduct diaries, private blog accessible only for their author and the panel administration, or public blogs which other panelists can comment on.
• Just a few clicks are needed to present the best blogs on an overview page on the website.

Related to Panelist Blogs

• Featured Blogs: Community websites will often present well-done or popular blogs of their members in special lists or on overview pages. With EFS Panel, you can easily create such an overview page, e.g. to present the blogs of your star bloggers, to introduce the blogs of new panelists or to highlight your own blog with official news.

Forum & Chat

If you want to create a chat, a guest book or a forum for a quick exchange of opinions, you can use the discussions tool newly introduced to EFS 7.0.

This new tool is the “light” version of the forum (previously: bulletin board): You can use it for types of communication which are characterized by a quick, non-structured sequence of short posts, as e.g. chats or guest books.

For detailed discussions, which might require a thread structure and features as e.g. Reply w/quote or upload of images, you might want to use the familiar forum.

Image and Document Exchange, Feed Management

The download management function for the panel website allows the creation of download lists, which panelists can use to download files, or even to actively exchange files among each other.

If you use EFS Panel as platform for a community, you can release the upload function for the panelists

With EFS Panel 7.0, you can easily enhance the news section of your panel by integrating texts from external sources. All you need to do, is subscribe to the external RSS or atom feed of the respective source, and the feed entries will be imported into the panel news automatically.

Data quality

Improving and securing data quality, particularly with regard to the requirements of the ESOMAR guidelines, has been one of the main topics of the last release 6.0: in this context, among others, panel tracking and the new automated duplicates check were introduced. In EFS 7.0, we go one step further: in future, EFS supports validation of survey participants by the external service provider  RelevantView.

Relevant ID - Keep your Data Clean

EFS supports an external validation of survey participants by  RelevantView. RelevantView checks the participants’ origin and identity and marks invalid participants, i.e.

• participants from countries/regions/cities not allowed for the survey
• duplicate respondents

Thus, you can identify them easily and take appropriate measures, e.g. by deleting duplicates or excluding data records from further analysis.

Complete Overhaul of Panel Statistics

The panel statistics has been overhauled completely.

• Split by two characteristics is possible.
• Optionally, the results of all variables can be printed in one table block.
• Panel statistics for candidates status and language version status are predefined for several time intervals.

Master Data Variables

The method how master data are stored and handled has been changed fundamentally in EFS 7.0. For you, as a panel owner or administrator, this means:

• Up to 2,700 master data can be created on a panel installation in future, instead of 2,400 master data as in the past.
• The variable names of master data can have up to 20 characters, instead of only eight characters as in the past.
• If you work with master data (e.g. trigger a recoding), it will not be necessary anymore to lock the complete master data table as long as your action may take. I.e. the performance will improve when working with master data. For actions which affect the master data table itself, though, the table will have to be kept locked (creation and deletion of master data, change of data type).

This changes have been made possible, in brief, by transferring the master data table to the table type InnoDB and by adapting the data base structure newly introduced for EFS Survey project variables for the master data of EFS Panel, specifically

Panel Performance

EFS Panel supports a growing amount of large panels with several hundred thousand panelists (~250,000 panelists). To improve the performance of panels of this size was one of the main goals of EFS 7.0. In this context, considerable changes have been made to the data base structure:

• The method how panelists, panel groups and assignments of panelists to groups are stored has been optimized for the needs of up-to-date large EFS Panels.
• Various important tables have been transferred to the table type InnoDB. With this table type, it is not necessary anymore to lock the whole table for every single action, i.e. the change accelerates the installation considerably.
• The JavaScript navigation in website editor has been modified in a way that it does not need to be reloaded completely for each individual action anymore.
• The list of panelists in panelists administration is now based on the same proven technique which is used for lists per default in all parts of EFS.
• The method how master data are stored and handled has been changed fundamentally in EFS 7.0.
• The panelist import has been overhauled completely, too.

Panel Grouping Features

Huge changes were made on all kind of grouping functionality in EFS Panel. Beyond redesigned user interfaces for editing and listing of groups, EFS 7.0 now offers some major improvements on panelist grouping.

• New feature: Statistics which can be created for individual groups. The analysis variable and two split variables can be selected.
• New filter variables: Use date calculations, based on the units day, month, year, week and hour.
• New filter sources: A quick poll could be used as base of a new panel group.
• More Complex: Subconditions in master data filters can be joined by AND or OR condition. (In EFS 6.0 only AND).
• Up-to-date automatically: Panelists who take part in a specific survey could automatically assigned to a group - if they match your update rule.

Panel Capacity Filters

The old scheduling feature of EFS Panel has been replaced by a new system, which is based on the familiar EFS filters.

• Which panelists should be treated as available - i.e. have not been used to their full capacity yet -, is defined using a so-called capacity filter.
• When drawing samples, the capacity filter can be used to define the basic set.
• The number of capacity filters on an EFS Panel installation is not limited. You decide which definition of availability should be used for a project by selecting the appropriate capacity filter when drawing samples.

Sampling for Surveys

The edit dialog for samples has been overhauled, several new functions have been added:

• The user interface has been modernized.
• The content of the Define basic set tab is presented in a new order: To improve overview, the functions have been split into standard options and extended options.
• Alternative grouping filters can be used to define the basic set.
• The stratification dialog provides more info. Futhermore, you can decide yourself if cell values should be interlaced or not.
• If you want to route sample members to an external survey, you have to work with personalized links. The functions to manage these links have been rebuilt to offer more comfort of use: You can not only upload, but export and delete links now. The respective functions are available as buttons on the Sample content tab, the old Import links tab has been removed.

Content Management System

The biggest novelty in CMS is, for sure, the community features. Additionally, a variety of other new features were added, most of them aiming at simplifying the daily routine of heavy CMS users.

A few examples:

• Content which is to be displayed on several pages of the panel, as e.g. news lists or contact forms, can be referenced with just a few clicks. It is not necessary anymore to create and configure the respective modules for every single page.
• Pages, templates or includes can be published or deleted en bloc.
• You can export the posts of a specific forum topic, instead of always exporting all posts of the whole forum.
• A newly-introduced rich text editor offers new possibilities for layouting news articles and FAQ.

Furthermore, various customer requests have been realized, as e.g. the full integration of bank payments into the incentive management system.

Webservices

The following new web services have been added:

• get_redemptions_status: allows to query bonus point redemptions in the panel.
• is_valid_panelist_login (login_type, login_value1, login_value2): allows to check if a panelist can log in to the panel website with the delivered login data.
• send_mail_to_panelist: allows to send e-mails to panelists.
• get_panelists_online: allows to check which panelists are currently visiting the website of the panel.
• get_promotional_status_for_email_address: allows to check the status of e-mail addresses which received tell-a-friend mails.

And many more...

• Newly Layouted Panel Overview
• Overhaul of the Detail View of the Panelists
• Relabelling Panel Statuses
• Changing Tracking Intervals (Default: 4, 8 and 12 weeks)
• Shortened Login Links for the Panel
• Behavior of Panel Surveys upon Time-out
• Enhanced update rule „Add to sample“: Optional mail initation of panelists and expiry date for participation can be defined