Define who to recruit and assess whether they can be reached
This step translates your target audience into executable recruitment criteria and gives a realistic assessment of whether that audience can be reached on panel. The audience and feasibility agents work as a pair — they actively reason about audience definitions, recruitment logic, and practical constraints rather than just formatting your inputs.
For panel-based projects, the platform assesses feasibility by:
1
Interpreting the audience definition
Translating your description (market, age range, behaviours, attributes) into concrete eligibility criteria.
2
Estimating incidence rate (IR)
Using heuristics, prior knowledge, and historical data to approximate how common this audience is in the general population. This estimate drives cost and timeline calculations.
3
Checking panel reachability
Determining whether the configured panel (e.g. Prolific) can reasonably supply this group. The agent understands, for example, which panels are 18+ only, or which markets have enough supply for rapid recruitment.
4
Providing a feasibility summary
Including an indicative incidence rate, cost and timeline guidance, and any warnings or recommendations.
When you propose an audience that’s difficult or impossible to reach, the system flags it and recommends adjustments.
Determine eligibility. Once the audience is confirmed feasible, the agent begins creating screener questions for it.
Profiling questions
Do not determine eligibility. They capture descriptive context — demographic or attitudinal detail — that helps interpretation and segmentation in analysis.
Profiling is most valuable when purposeful: enough to explain differences between groups you care about, without turning the project into a complex quant-style design.
Iteration is normal as you refine the definition based on feasibility feedback.
Issue
Example prompt
Incidence too low
”The IR looks too low. Broaden the age range to 25–45 and change the purchase requirement from past 3 months to past 12 months.”
Unnecessary exclusions
”Remove the exclusion for people who’ve participated in research recently. That’s making this too narrow.”
Sample vs timeline trade-off
”If we reduce the sample from 50 to 30 interviews, how much faster would fieldwork be? Show me cost and timing for both.”
Refining profiling
”Add profiling questions about household composition and employment status — we’ll need those for segmentation.”
This is often where routing decisions become clear: ultra-narrow B2B targets, complex quota needs, or markets with limited panel supply may need a managed route rather than self-service.
Using your own audience is possible within the system. To set this up, reach out to your Focaldata account manager. Own-audience and universal-link projects skip the feasibility agent and follow a fixed per-respondent pricing model.
