Sky News to deliver daily national opinion polls during Labour and Tory Conferences

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 September 2009 17:27 Tuesday, 29 September 2009 17:27

Sky News has announced that it is working with YouGov to deliver daily national opinion polls during the remaining party conferences. And - in an entirely separate move - is also working with MindTracker to provide virtually instantaneous Sky News viewer reaction to both Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s speeches.

YouGov Daily Opinion Polls

From today, Sky News will be delivering daily YouGov opinion polls to its viewers, based on a fresh sample of 1000 adults online carried out every weekday throughout Great Britain all this week and next week.

Peter Kellner, YouGov’s President, said: “This represents a major breakthrough in tracker research. Past “daily” tracker polls in Britain, as in the US, have generally involved only 250 fresh interviews each day, with “daily” data reflecting four days of research. YouGov’s polls for Sky News will provide a completely fresh and up-to-date report of the public mood daily during the Labour and Conservative conferences."

The daily polls will allow viewers, as well as Sky News’ political team, to analyse the effects that different announcements and speeches during both the Labour and Conservative party conferences are having on voter opinion.

The daily online YouGov polls will measure fluctuations in voting intentions across the two weeks, as well as asking respondents to register their opinion on different topical questions coming out of the conferences each day.

YouGov's daily polls will be reported each day at 5pm on Sky News’ Live at Five programme, except on the days of the keynote speeches of Gordon Brown (Tuesday 29 September) and David Cameron (Thursday 8 October) when YouGov's daily poll report will be brought forward to noon. On those days, the findings of the YouGov surveys of a specially selected group of at least 500 voters' responses to those keynote speeches will be reported on Live at Five at 5pm.

Peter Kellner said: "These will be the fastest scientific, full-scale surveys ever conducted in Britain. As Britain’s pioneering online polling company, YouGov is delighted to partner Britain’s pioneering 24-hour news channel, to bring the public’s voice, without delay, into the heart of the news and public debate.”

Stephan Shakespeare, YouGov’s Chief Innovations Officer, added: “This YouGov/Sky News experiment is the next stage in expanding the role of public opinion in our national debate. There’s a lot more of this still to come!”

Sky News viewer leader speech surveys - provided by MindTracker

And for the first time, Sky News viewers will be invited to take part in two MindTracker surveys immediately after each of the speeches by the Labour and Conservative party leaders.

The first survey will go live on www.skynews.com shortly after the end of Gordon Brown’s speech tomorrow (Tuesday 29 September) and the second will be available shortly after the end of David Cameron’s speech the following week, Thursday 08 October.

A short segment of each of the speeches will be selected and posted online by MindTracker on www.skynews.com . People taking part in the survey will simply visit the website and watch the video. As they are watching, they indicate how they’re feeling about what they see and hear by means of an interactive scale designed to bypass their reasoning and record their gut reactions.

MindTracker will record the results and participants in the survey will be able to measure their responses against the other participants immediately after completion. Initial overall results of both surveys will be revealed on air on the SkyNews.com show with Martin Stanford at 7pm on the day they each take place. A more detailed breakdown will then be available the day after each survey on Sky News and the sky news website.

Michael Johnson, Director of MindTracker, explained how the market research technology works: “We are able to effectively quantify and evaluate an individual's emotional response to specific stimuli word by word, note by note, second by second. Our MindTracker technology generates the most reliable insight into how respondents feel about visual media. We don't ask our panels to answer pages of questionnaires or attend focus groups. We simply ask them to respond instinctively to what they see - and then wait for the results.”

“In our work with Sky News for the leaders’ speeches, we have chosen to apply our unique technology to short segments of each speech, with the most controversial subjects. Then, thousands of Sky News viewers take part to generate a fascinating insight into how they feel.”

Chris Birkett, Executive Editor for Sky News, said: “We chose to work with both YouGov and MindTracker as each helps us – through different methodology - to bring Sky News viewers a unique insight into people’s reactions to the two party conferences, to see who’s doing well at any particular moment, or conversely which party might be losing traction with voters.

“In the run up to what is likely to be one of the most important general elections in over a decade, these polls and surveys will form part of our in-depth coverage of both conferences, and will perfectly compliment the expert opinion and analysis of events by our first class political team led by Political Editor, Adam Boulton.”