Taking to the stage yesterday afternoon in a session on online research was Philip Garland, chief methodologist for SurveyMonkey.

“I was surprised to find out they had a chief methodologist,” said session chair Martin Oxley. He said he meant it as a compliment, but the room took it to be an amusing dig at the DIY survey software developer.

Garland shrugged it off. He said he knows SurveyMonkey has a bad reputation among certain sections of the research industry. He asked the room to raise their hands if they thought – now or ever – that SurveyMonkey was “a bad word”. A majority raised their hands.

In recent years people have started to be bombarded with surveys, many of them of dubious quality. With the rise in surveys has come a corresponding decline in response rates.

SurveyMonkey and other DIY software suppliers have been blamed for this state of affairs, Garland said, as their arrival on the scene coincided with the rise in survey invites.

But addressing delegates, he said: “You of all people should know that correlation is not causation.”

Garland’s pitch to the audience was that the research industry should drop their hostility to SurveyMonkey. The people taking the company’s surveys are just like anyone else, he said, and to prove it they ran their own studies of presidential approval and economic confidence to compare to Gallup’s numbers. SurveyMonkey’s raw, unweighted data seemed acceptably close in comparison on most occasions.

The company also has sheer weight of numbers on its side. SurveyMonkey did 600 million completes last year, Garland said – a staggering number.