Groundbreaking Study Highlights AudioNow® Multilingual Surveys for Mobile Phones

AudioNow® Surveys 5,500 Immigrant Radio Listeners as Part of New Study Funded by the Knight Foundation

October 19, 2015 – Washington, D.C. AudioNow®, with its leading radio-by-phone platform, recently partnered with IMPRINT, a coalition of non-profits, to survey more than 5,500 immigrant radio listeners — many hailing from traditionally “hard-to-reach communities” — on mobile phones across the U.S. The just released, “Surveying Immigrant Radio Listeners: A Case Study,” highlights AudioNow’s survey technology as an innovative new technique, in a study funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The study also revealed industry-high participation rates for the mobile survey.

AudioNow ® is the leading provider of in-language mobile applications and call-to-listen technology for broadcasters. With more than 3,000 partners around the world, AudioNow ® helps extend the reach of radio and television in 97 languages, representing 130 nationalities and ethnicities, to listeners on any mobile phone.

Surveys were launched for mobile radio audiences across AudioNow’s® Call-to-Listen™ platform in five languages (Amharic, English, Haitian Creole, Punjabi, and Swahili), in partnership with twenty-two broadcasters serving diaspora communities in the U.S. Call-to-Listen™ technology allows listeners to dial a regular telephone number from any cell phone to hear their favorite radio station live. Calling in, listeners are given the option to take a short survey, responding with their keypads, before connecting to the regular broadcast.

Radio audiences were asked about levels of civic engagement, social capital, higher education, employment status and their perceived barriers to employment.

IMPRINT, the Immigrant Professional Integration project, working with their home organization WES Global Talent Bridge, sought to investigate the factors contributing to the successful integration of immigrant professional in the U.S. Their new report, ‘Steps to Success: Integrating Immigrant Professionals in the United States,’ is the product of that effort reporting on information learned from both online and mobile phone surveys by AudioNow®.

“This telephonic survey of radio listeners helped gather detailed data from a diverse, hard-to-reach audience, including many limited English-speaking individuals who are often not represented in traditional surveys,” reports IMPRINT Director Stacey Simon in the AudioNow case study. “The response was almost instantaneous. Within the first few days, we had had more than 4,000 respondents, including 2,300 who lived in one of the target cities.”

Learn more about AudioNow ® and participating broadcasters in “Surveying Immigrant Radio Listeners: A Case Study,” available at www.AudioNow.com or www.imprintproject.org, and see the study’s full results in ‘Steps to Success: Integrating Immigrant Professionals in the United States’, also on IMPRINT’s website.