We create methodologies and open-source tools for performing social science in the digital world: recruiting representative survey panels and evaluating the behavioral impact of ad campaigns, apps, and websites.
Leverage the targeting power of digital advertising to recruit a custom, stratified pool of respondents. Virtual Lab creates custom audiences and conversion events to optimize targeting, enabling you to stratify by any variable for which you can gather data.
Virtual Lab creates separate ad sets for each stratum and optimizes ad spending to ensure your over-represented strata and your under-represented strata become properly-represented strata.
Survey respondents via web surveys, chatbots, or any digital experience you can connect. Virtual Lab comes with a lightweight web survey optimized for poor connections and a chatbot that works with Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Follow up after hours, days, weeks or months for seamless longitudinal studies or experience sampling.
Divide your respondents into balanced treatment groups and test the effect of your ad by actually advertising to them in the real world, on their Facebook timelines, Instagram feeds, Google search results, or the websites they browse.
Monitor responses in realtime via the Virtual Lab dashboard and download current data in CSV format at any time. See when respondents join, how long they spend, and how many questions they answer.
Open source code ensures full transparency and auditing of security practices. Host Virtual Lab yourself and own your own data or let us take care of the hosting on GDPR compliant, secure Google Cloud infrastructure. All network communication is encrypted by default with TLS and all data at rest stored on encrypted cloud block storage.
Virtual Lab was built to power studies by us, researchers and academics trying to come up with more efficient models of running studies. Here's how it's been used, both by us and by external research teams:
Do short videoclips delivered through social media change gender attitudes and promote information-seeking behaviors in Urban India?
This study evaluates a series of online videos supported and produced by two edutainment champions in the field: Population Foundation of India (PFI) and the WEvolve initiative. Respondents are randomly assigned to either a control group or one of three treatment arms, where they are sent videos from PFI, WEvolve, or both.
Respondents are sent videos, one-at-a-time, over the course of several days. All video plays are recorded on the Virtual Lab platform. Baseline questions on knowledge and attitudes are asked before the videos, one week after the videos are shown, and again after 3 months.
Respondents are invited to share the videos with their friends as well as sent links to webpages of NGOs working on gender-related topics. Clicks to the websites are tracked and a measurement of time visited calculated allowing the researchers to measure quasi-behavioral outcomes.
In addition to its impacts on public health and the global economic system, the novel coronavirus has led to increasing concerns about racial attitudes and stereotypes and their impacts on political attitudes and sentiments towards global cooperation. These stereotypes may also translate into more general geo-political attitudes towards individual countries, such as China, who was at the center of the outbreak.
Using the geographical targeting in Facebook's ad platform, respondents were collected across 542 municipalities and 90 provinces in Italy. Surveys began in February, 2020 and were continued through out the crisis, with a few questions being asked to each respondent at weekly or bi-weekly intervals.
Asking questions via Messenger enabled the researchers to have continued, constant contact with demographically targeted respondents with low attrition rates and extremely low recruitment costs.
What do urban young people in Nigeria want for their future and how do they think about opportunities in the public and private sectors?
Recruitment was carried out via an advertising campaign on Facebook targeted to residents of the 10 largest cities in Nigeria, with population above 1 million people (Abuja, Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Benin City, Port-Harcourt, Jos, Ilorin, Kaduna, Enugu) aged between 13 and 19. To incentivize participation in the survey, the Ad banner displayed a picture of a brand-new Nigerian-made tablet (TECNO DROID PAD 8 II) and a sign saying that anyone who completed our survey would enter a raffle to win up to 3 tablets.
Overall, during one week, about 3000 people clicked on the Facebook Ad, about 890 people started the survey and almost 560 completed it. The survey collected information on 1. Beliefs about Public and Private Sectors; 2. Career choices; 3. Use of media.
Interested in running Virtual Lab on your own infrastructure? All code is open source and runs on any server cluster running Kubernetes + Helm. Also, we're hiring.
Our mission is to make it easier and cheaper for researchers, governments, and NGO's to perform statistically valid inference about the attitudes and behaviors of populations. We leverage digital tools to reach individuals, ask them questions, and involve them in experiments.
As an engineer with Virtual Lab, you will join a small team dedicated to making smart choices and building a robust, reliable, and scalable platform that leverages the latest technologies. The platform is open source, we use open source tools, and you will be encouraged to contribute to existing libraries and/or abstract logic into reusable tools where appropriate.
Interested? jobs@vlab.digital
You should:
1. Be excited to work with a large set of services written in Go, Node.js, and Python.
2. Love evented systems, queues, immutability, idempotence, visibility, and reproducibility.
3. Be comfortable designing both transactional and analytics databases, as well as moving data in/out of them efficiently and reliably.
4. Love container orchestration. We currently use Kubernetes.
5. Love testing, including complex integration tests involving many containers and services.
6. Be ready to grow into a technical leadership role with architectural and design responsibilities.
Privacy Policy
Virtual Lab, LLC ("Virtual Lab", "we", "us") operates a research platform that enables academic institutions and nonprofits to design, recruit for, and run behavioral studies. This policy describes what data we collect, why, how we use it, and the choices you have. It applies to all parts of our service — including the dashboard and API used by researchers (for study configuration, recruitment, and analytics) and our survey-delivery service, which runs over chat, messaging, SMS, and web channels (including Facebook Messenger and other platforms researchers may connect).
This policy applies to two groups:
For participant data, the researcher's institution is normally the data controller and we act as a data processor on their behalf. For researcher account data, we are the controller.
The exact fields depend on the study. Typical categories include:
We do not ask researchers to collect, and we do not knowingly process, payment card data or government identifiers.
Some studies may involve special categories of personal data within the meaning of GDPR Article 9 (e.g. health, political opinion, religion, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation). Where such data is collected, the researcher's institution is responsible for obtaining the explicit consent required under Article 9(2)(a) and any necessary ethics-committee or IRB approval. We process such data only on the controller's documented instructions.
The dashboard uses cookies and browser local storage only for authentication and UI preferences. We do not use third-party advertising cookies.
We use this data to:
We do not sell personal data, use participant responses to train general-purpose AI models, or use participant data for advertising outside of the specific study the participant joined.
Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, we rely on the following legal bases:
A Data Processing Agreement (DPA) is available on request to institutional customers who require one — contact privacy@vlab.digital.
We share information only as needed to operate the service:
We do not sell or rent personal data to third parties.
Our production infrastructure is hosted in the European Union (Google Cloud, europe-west regions). Virtual Lab, LLC is incorporated in the United States, so data may be accessed by our staff and U.S.-based subprocessors. Where required for transfers out of the EEA, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses and equivalent safeguards.
Deletion requests against primary stores are honored promptly. Because backups age out on a fixed cycle, deleted records may persist in encrypted backup archives for up to 90 days.
We apply layered security controls including:
No system is perfectly secure; please report suspected vulnerabilities to the contact below.
In the event of a personal data breach affecting data processed on a controller's behalf, we will notify the affected controller without undue delay and, where feasible, within 72 hours of becoming aware of the breach, consistent with GDPR Article 33.
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:
To exercise these rights, use the contact details below. If your data was collected as part of a study, please contact the researcher's institution first; we will support them in responding. We respond to verified rights requests within one month, extendable by up to two further months for complex requests.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority in your EU/EEA member state. A list is maintained at edpb.europa.eu.
If you are a California resident, the CCPA (as amended by the CPRA) gives you the right to know, delete, correct, opt out of sale or sharing, and not be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not sell or share personal information as defined by the CCPA. To exercise these rights, contact privacy@vlab.digital.
We do not make decisions about participants based solely on automated processing that produce legal or similarly significant effects within the meaning of GDPR Article 22.
The platform is intended for use in research approved by an institutional review board (IRB) or equivalent ethics committee. Researchers are responsible for obtaining the appropriate consent (including parental or guardian consent where applicable) before enrolling minors. We do not knowingly collect data directly from children under 13 without such consent.
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be announced in the dashboard and, where appropriate, by email to the account owner. The "Last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent revision.
Virtual Lab, LLC
5931 NW Burgundy Drive
Corvallis, OR 97330, USA
Email: privacy@vlab.digital
For data processing matters where we are acting as a processor on behalf of a researcher institution, please also contact that institution's data protection officer.