What it does
Poll Masters runs panel research and opinion polling at provincial scale. Researchers design questionnaires in admin; field enumerators administer them on tablets (with branching and validation); results land in a live dashboard that crosstabs by demographic on the fly.
Highlights
- Visual questionnaire designer drag question types (single, multi, scale, free text, GPS, photo), define branching rules, validate before publishing. No code.
- Stratified sampling every poll defines its sample frame (county × age × gender × occupation × turnout history); the system schedules enumerators against quotas and tracks fill rate.
- Offline tablet collection enumerators work without signal, sync when a hotspot's available. GPS-tagged answers + tablet device ID make falsification expensive.
- Live dashboard results visualised as they land; crosstabs on any pair of demographics; researcher can spot a regional skew the same day data starts flowing.
- Quality-control pass supervisors review a random sample of completed surveys + the GPS trail; flagged enumerators get follow-up calls.
- Report exports PDF (for the client), CSV (for the analyst), Stata (for the academic). Every variant carries the methodology + quota fill stats.
- Panel mode re-poll the same respondents in waves; the platform tracks attrition and consent renewal automatically.
How we built it
Laravel admin + Vue field PWA. Postgres with row-level partitioning by poll. The stratification engine is a pure function on quotas; assignment to enumerators is a queued matching job that runs nightly.
Behind the scenes
- Falsification controls: enumerator device fingerprint + GPS trail + completion-time distribution flag outliers for supervisor review.
- Privacy: respondents are stored as panel IDs, not names; PII is held separately and only accessible to the research lead.
- Versioned questionnaires: edits to a live poll branch a new version; existing responses are tagged with the version they answered, so the report can mix or filter cleanly.
What changed for the client
Turnaround from "client briefs on Monday" to "report delivered Friday" became routine for ~1,000-respondent polls. The faster cycle let the research firm take on more clients without growing headcount.