Frequently asked questions
At Lumaris, we use surveys and focus groups to deeply understand what people think and feel.
Our goal: Deliver quality data that shapes your organization's key decisions.
Lumaris is non-partisan. We don't work for candidates or political parties.
Lumaris Community Surveys deliver:
-
Local and diverse insights: Our team has built a community of Minnesotans from every corner of the state that is ready to take your surveys, including those from communities of color, immigrants, people with disabilities and rural communities.
-
Reliable insights: We’ve verified identities so that you know you’re reaching real Minnesotans. Plus, we’re transparent about our methodologies.
-
Relevant and timely insights: Receive quick-turn insights that inform your strategies and initiatives. You'll get answers in days, not months.
-
Customized solutions: We tailor our approach to meet the needs and objectives of your organization. Our research toolkit includes quantitative surveys, focus groups, and advanced data analysis.
-
At Lumaris, the work we do to produce quality data serves a single goal: Shape the key decisions that affect communities across the country.
In the process of doing this, we want to be your community's trusted source of facts -- the place people turn to for reliable answers about what people think and feel.
We also want to make local, quality survey data more accessible. We achieve this through our Lumaris Community Surveys, which deliver quality surveys at a fraction of the cost of current alternatives.Survey research
Questionnaire development, survey fieldwork
Survey methodology
Sample design, sample weighing, question testing
Panel research
Time-series and change-over-time analysis
Advanced analytics
Clean, analyze and join datasets of any kind
Demographic research
Advanced analysis of census data.
Editorial
Report writing, copy editing, chart creation
Our proprietary online survey panels are probability-based. They’re designed from the start to be representative of a state and its largest metro area.
We don’t stop until our panels can produce reliable results on traditionally underrepresented groups. We achieve this through oversampling at the census block level.
Lumaris uses gold-standard methodologies to build its panels: Mail recruitment via random address-based sampling.
We currently operate the Minnesota Community Survey, which offers representative results of the state, the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota regions.
If you're interested in other states, please contact us.
Yes. Our surveys produce reliable data on a state’s biggest metro area(s) and its rural region(s), as well as major cities and counties. Every state is different, so please contact us for more details.
A state's survey panel usually starts with around 2,000 adults. The number of panelists in a state may grow over time.
Yes. Our surveys are conducted in English and Spanish. In some situations, we may survey in more languages to ensure proper representation of certain groups of people.
Lumaris regularly evaluates its survey panels to ensure that they are representative of the state it represents. This can mean inviting new people to the panel and retiring existing panelists.
Yes, we provide several qualitative research solutions. One common request is to pair a survey with focus groups.
Lumaris can precisely recruit people for focus groups at a reasonable cost. We do this by using our survey panels as a recruitment tool.
Each panelist provides detailed demographic information about themselves. This makes it efficient to identify and recruit people with rare demographic characteristics.
Our secret sauce: The diversity of Lumaris’ survey panelists. We achieve this through our rigorous methods, which require that survey panels demographically reflect the population of their state.
Yes, we can leverage our deep experience in survey research to help you learn more about the group of people you want to survey.
We can help you write the survey and ensure it is methodologically sound. We can field it on our servers and deliver a dataset. We can even analyze it for you and write up the results.
Yes, you can BYOD - Bring Your Own Dataset - and we’ll analyze it.
We can combine data sets to provide unique insights. For example, we can merge a Census Bureau dataset with a survey dataset.
Yes, Lumaris researchers are experts in using the Census Bureau’s major products: The Decennial Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, Population Estimates, and more.
We also have experience analyzing Bureau of Labor Statistics and other federal datasets.