How NCOA Reviews Products and Services
How we make money
While we may make a commission from the links in our stories, brands cannot pay us to be featured in our content—and the editorial team is not influenced by others when deciding which products we recommend. Our research and development and editorial teams work hand in hand to highlight products and services that shined in our testing, but we also write about the brands that performed poorly to warn our readers about bad actors. What you get are honest reviews that we proudly stand behind, and the commissions we make help to fund further research and testing.
Our testing process
We approach every story with our readers in mind. When we begin to research a product or service, we collect a wide variety of information, including published studies in peer-reviewed journals, relevant reviews, expert consultations, and more. We then conduct surveys of real consumers to understand their user journey. We use the results of our surveys to design custom scoring that reflects the needs of these consumers and allows us to objectively evaluate each of the brands we cover.
It is most important to us that we see things through the eyes of our readers, so we conduct hands-on tests of the products and services we write about and coordinate focus groups to add to our first-person insights. We put brand claims under the microscope, analyzing the service range of medical alert systems to the exact number of feet, for example, and submerging hearing aids in dunk tanks to see if the brands’ water resistance claims are accurate.
Throughout our process, we conduct interviews with experts in the field and stay up to date with scientific studies and industry regulations. We believe our work here is never done, and we continue to add to our research and insights, so that we’re always the best resource for our readers.
- 20,500+ hours of research and testing
- 26 surveys with more than 13,500 total respondents
- Held 8 focus groups
- Spoke with more than 49 experts in the field
We’ve investigated brands that are household names and those that have just entered the market. Doing this, we’ve found products and services that we highly recommend—but we’ve also uncovered products that don’t work as they should, services that have predatory contractual practices, and even outright scams. Our team takes this responsibility seriously, and we don’t hold back when something in the testing queue has raised a red flag.
Our editorial process
Our team of writers are subject matter experts in their fields. After we finish writing, our team of experienced editors reviews each story. The stories are then sent to fact-checkers for review before they are scrutinized by a medical reviewer from our review board. Another member of the editorial team then edits stories for a second time.
Next, the article is built and reviewed again by an editor and a subject matter expert. If you’ve lost count, that’s nearly a dozen different people who review our content before it reaches you.
Our team loves hearing from you, so please email us at reviewsteam@ncoa.org.