Ipsos's Great British Royal Weekend: Bumper response to mobile survey

Bumper response to mobile survey

This weekend over 750 panellists were recruited from Ipsos’s online panel to download a bespoke Royal Wedding app to their smartphones.

Working in partnership with Techneos, the Wedding provided a great opportunity to invite respondents to participate in "real time" research, giving us a unique grassroots picture of how events unfolded in homes and communities across the country.

The app asked participants to complete a survey before and after the Wedding, telling us how they were feeling, who they were spending the day with, and to share their Royal Wedding moments with texts and images as often as they liked through the weekend. So far the survey has received over 1000 responses, including pictures of food and drink, families and communities, and texts reflecting on everything from TV coverage to the dress and the ceremony. The survey remains open for the rest of the weekend.

Sarah Castell, Head of Qualitative Methods at Ipsos, said

“The flexible, mobile approach showed us what people were doing – and crucially, how they felt and how things changed and developed for them during the day. Merging qualitative and quantitative data like this gives us a really rounded picture of public views.”

See our photos on Sky News

• Sky News covered this mobile event and has set up a gallery for some of our partcipants’ photos which can be seen on their website

What did the public do and say?

61% of the mobile group said in advance of the day that they were interested in the Royal Wedding, which is slightly higher than the level of interest expressed by the general public.

A minority group who thought they’d be uninterested actually found themselves surprised to be swept along by the emotion of the ceremony. We received many texts like this:-

• “I’m surprised, I started crying when I saw the princes and haven’t really stopped!”
• “Really didn’t think I’d be watching, but the majesty of it is all so absorbing”
• “I’m a bloke - but suddenly struck with excitement, now that Kate is almost there”

The day seemed to create a patriotic spirit. The day before the wedding, we asked participants how ‘patriotic’ they were feeling. They scored 5 out of 10 on average. During the day, however, this level rose to 7 out of 10 and remained high all day.

• “I’m feeling particularly British right now!”

There were a high number of positive comments about the young royals Princes William, Harry and the new Duchess of Cambridge. The public took from the ceremony that they were “refreshingly unstuffy”; “people with a sense of humour” and “down to earth”. A minority of anti-royalists even texted us to tell us that they were revisiting their republican views:-

• “I am enjoying the wedding far more than expected. A staunch anti royalist, my views have changed today.”

Our opinion polling since 1993 consistently shows around three quarters of Britons to be in favour of the monarchy. It remains to be seen whether the positive spirit found yesterday among our panellists is reflected in the public as a whole, and whether levels of support for the monarchy will rise even higher after the Royal Wedding. Technical data Base size 754 participants, giving 1328 responses as of Saturday 30th April 10am