How people communicate has fundamentally changed, and the traditional method of gauging public opinion – through landline phone calls and personal interviews – has desperately needed revamping in response. Fewer people answer unknown numbers, own landlines, or answer the doorbell with strangers outside, and that’s caused a precipitous and steady decline in survey response rates.
At Bravo Group, we understood this communication shift and embraced the promise of digital polling: meeting respondents where they are and receiving constraint-free insights. To confront this new reality, we built our digital opinion platform — Beagly — from scratch in 2015.
This gives us full control over how surveys are structured, how participants are recruited, and how data is validated to ensure accuracy. For example, we identified that former Senator Bob Casey’s seat might be in trouble as early as October 2022, well before his loss to Dave McCormick in 2024. Our approach differs from traditional pollsters, but the results speak for themselves: highly accurate, high-quality data that helps drive strategic decisions in Pennsylvania.
Why Digital Polling Works
We’ve found that smaller sample sizes often accomplish the research objective. Our surveys provide directional insights that help shape campaign strategy and messaging, and we’ve found very little trade-off in accuracy. For example, with a large field and a very low sample, we called Larry Krasner’s primary Philadelphia District Attorney victory in 2017 with the same accuracy as traditional polling outlets.
The advantages of our approach make it clear why digital polling — specifically, Bravo Group’s digital polling — is becoming a new gold standard:
- Minimal intrusion to respondents’ day — Unlike phone polling, which can make people feel put on the spot, our surveys reach people on mobile devices and allow them to participate at a time of their choice.
- Experience is paramount — Unlike typical multimodal polling, each user experiences the questions in the exact same way, regardless of what device they’re using.
- Answer at your own pace — Giving respondents time to think through their answers improves comprehension and elevates response quality.
- More visual elements and fewer words — Images, videos, and interactive elements increase question comprehension, reduce survey fatigue and drop-off rates, and produce more complete datasets.
- Customized incentive delivery — Participants choose their incentive, improving engagement and response rates.
- Built for recruitment — Our platform is designed to recruit participants using both probability sampling text message outreach and non-probability sampling through panels and digital or social media advertising. This approach ensures rich data collection while balancing the benefits of random selection with targeted recruitment strategies.
- Participant authentication — We minimize fraud with built-in security measures, including duplicate IP address detection, fast-response identification, social media sign-ins, and unique invitations. We also block low-quality responses before they enter the dataset.
- Transparency — We believe in sharing our data and methodology openly. That’s why we publish dashboards with our results, allowing audiences to see the data firsthand rather than telling them to just take our word for it.
The Changing Landscape of Survey Research
Once the industry gold standard, phone polling has seen response rates decrease by nearly 90% over the past few decades, a Gallup study found. The Pew Research Center reported that response rates to phone surveys were 36% in 1997, plummeted to just 6% by 2018, and continue to decline.
Meanwhile, the adoption of digital-first continues to gain steam — including Pew, which switched to almost completely conducting its U.S. surveys online. A 2023 report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, to which Bravo belongs, noted that well-structured online surveys can achieve accuracy on par with traditional polling methods, especially when methodological rigor is applied to recruitment, weighting, and fraud prevention.
However, the science of digital polling is still evolving. Researchers continue to refine best practices around sample balancing, response weighting, and fraud detection. At Bravo Group, we’re at the forefront of these advancements. Our proprietary platform allows us to experiment, refine, and improve with each survey we conduct, ensuring we stay ahead of industry trends.
Looking Ahead
As technology continues to reshape public opinion research, we’re committed to leading the charge in digital polling. Our approach isn’t just about keeping up with change but driving it. We stand by our methodology, our results, and the insights we provide to clients across Pennsylvania.
To explore our latest polling data, sign up to visit our Morning Scrapple dashboard, where you can interact with visualized results, filter by demographics and gain deeper insights into Pennsylvania’s shifting opinions.
