2) A second step was that we asked Coredata to check FCA numbers against the register to make sure all the people whose votes we captured were indeed still registered.
3) We then pulled out names and I physically phoned a randomised sample of more than 120 companies to ask ‘did you take part in the FASA service awards to vote for providers?’ This was to make sure they voted and they knew who they were voting for - and why.
4) We gave companies a bespoke trackable link for their promotions, so we can track how many advisers are coming from those links. We saw no correlation between the numbers of high scores given and email promotions, suggesting advisers scored providers independently of any promotions, even if they were prompted to vote by the email reminders.
In addition, we moved our survey deadlines forward a week so we could conduct all the data searching and analysis in good time.
In all those searches, we only found one firm that we could not reasonably include as it was no longer active, so we removed it from the overall score sheets.
