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Online Survey Tools
10 Tips to
Improve Your Survey Responses
The
following offers tips from
Zoomerang, on how to improve the quality and
quantity of your survey response rates. |
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1. |
| Clearly
define the purpose of the survey. |
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| Good surveys
have focused objectives that are easily understood.
For a survey to be successful you need to spend time
up front to identify, IN WRITING: |
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What is
the goal of this survey? |
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What
do you hope to accomplish with this survey?
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Why
are you creating this survey? |
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How will
you use the data you are collecting? |
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What
decisions do you hope to be able to provide
input to from this survey? (This will later
help you identify what data you need to
collect in order to make these decisions) |
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| Sounds
obvious, but we have seen plenty of surveys where a
few minutes planning could have made the difference
between receiving quality responses (defined as
responses that are useful as inputs to decisions)
instead of un-interpretable data. |
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| Consider the
case of the software firm that wanted to find out
what new functionality was most important to
customers. The survey asked ‘How can we improve our
product?’ The resulting answers were anything from
‘Make it easier’ to ‘Add an update button on the
recruiting page’. While interesting information –
and perhaps the insight that users viewed the
software as ‘hard to use’ should be examined – this
data is not really helpful for the product manager
who wanted to take an itemized list to the
development team using customer input as a
prioritization variable. |
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| Spending
time identifying the objective might have helped the
survey creators determine: 1) are we trying to
understand our customers' perception of our software
in order to identify areas of improvement e.g. hard
to use, time consuming, unreliable or 2) or are we
trying to understand the value of specific
enhancements. For example, please rank from 1 – 5
the importance of adding X new functionality. |
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| Fuzzy goals
lead to fuzzy results and the last thing you want to
end up with is a set of results that provide no real
decision enhancing value. Upfront planning helps
ensure that the surveys ask the right questions to
meet the objective and therefore the data you
collect is useful. |
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2. |
| Keep the
survey short and focused |
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| Short and
focused helps with both quality and quantity of
response. It is generally better to focus on a
single objective than try to create a master survey
that covers multiple objectives. |
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| Shorter
surveys generally have high response rates and lower
abandonment among survey takers. It’s human nature
to want things to be quick and easy – once a survey
taker loses interest they simply abandon – leaving
you with the task of determining how to interpret
that partial data set (or whether to use it all). |
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| Make sure
each of your questions is focused on helping to meet
your stated objective. Don’t toss in ‘nice to have’
questions unless that don’t directly provide data to
help you meet your objectives. |
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| Time a few
people taking the survey. Ideally the survey should
take 5 minutes or less to complete. 6 – 10 minutes
is OK, however, we see significant abandonment rates
occurring after 11 minutes. |
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3. |
| Keep the
questions simple. |
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| Make sure
your questions get to the point and avoid the use of
jargon. We on the Zoom team have often received
surveys with questions along the lines of. “When was
the last time you used our RGS?” (Huh? What’s RGS?)
Don’t assume that your survey takers are as
comfortable with your acronyms as you are. |
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| Try to make
your questions as specific and direct as possible.
Compare: What has your experience been working with
our HR team? To: How satisfied are you with the
response time of our HR team? |
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4. |
| Used
closed ended questions whenever possible |
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| Closed ended
questions can take the form of yes/no, multiple
choice or rating scale. Closed ended questions make
it easier to analyze results. Open-ended questions
are great supplemental questions and may provide
useful qualitative information and insights,
however, for collating and analysis purposes
close-ended questions are preferable. One caveat is
to make sure your closed ended question doesn’t
force survey takers into picking a ‘less bad’
answer. |
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5. |
| Keep
rating scale questions consistent |
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| Rating
scales are a great way to measure and compare sets
of variables. If you elect to use rating scales
(e.g. from 1 – 5) keep it consistent throughout the
survey; use the same number of points on the scale
and make sure meanings of high and low stay
consistent. Also, use an odd number in your rating
scale to make data analysis easier. Switching your
rating scales around will confuse survey takers
leading to untrustworthy responses. |
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6. |
| Logical
ordering |
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| Make sure
your survey flows in a logical order. Begin with a
brief introduction – do not reveal the survey
objective. Next, it is a good idea to generally
start from broader based questions moving to those
narrower in scope. It is usually better to collect
demographic data and ask any particularly sensitive
questions at the end (unless you are using this
information to screen out survey participants). If
you are asking for contact information, place that
information last. |
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7. |
| Pre-test
your survey |
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| Make sure
you pre-test your survey with a few members of your
target audience to find glitches and unexpected
question interpretations. |
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8. |
| If
sending survey by email avoid Friday, Saturday or
Sunday |
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| In general,
we have found that avoiding these days helps improve
results. In addition, Mondays are also good days to
avoid as many people have loaded in-boxes they are
wading through Monday morning. |
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9. |
| Consider
using reminders |
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| While not
appropriate for all surveys, sending out reminders
to those who haven’t previously responded often can
often provide a significant boost to response rates. |
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10. |
| Consider
offering an incentive |
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| Depending
upon the type of survey and survey audience,
offering an incentive is usually very effective in
improving response rates. People like the idea of
getting something for their time and we have found
that incentives typically boost response rates by
50% on average. |
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| One caveat
is to keep the incentive appropriate in scope.
Overly large incentives can lead to undesirable
behavior e.g. people lying about demographics etc in
order to not be screened out from taking the survey. |
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