Introduction to Online Surveys


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Best Practices in Creating a Survey

Pre-design

1. Start your survey project by thinking about your goals rather than the list of questions.Many companies start a survey project with a giant brainstorming session centered around what questions should be asked on a survey. Instead, start with "What do we need to learn from this survey?" and "What do we want to do with this data?"

2. Remember that feedback should be an ongoing process.Start integrating feedback into day-to-day operations. Most companies use software to manage content on their websites, track the sales cycle, process sales and send marketing messages. These same systems can be used to trigger appropriate feedback surveys in your survey software. Continuous feedback allows you to monitor feedback trends over time.

Design

3. Keep it short! If the survey is long and you absolutely can't shorten it, break it into more pages to make it appear shorter.

4. Avoid open-ended questions whenever possible. They require more effort to answer, lowering your response rate. Plus, open-ended questions are painful to summarize when it comes to reporting. One notable exception is a single "additional comments" test area at the end of a survey.

5. Ask only relevant questions. Tailor questions dynamically so that every question and option is as relevant as possible. And, don't ask the respondent for information that you already have on hand - like what products they just ordered.

6. Don't require too much from respondents. Require only the questions that are relevant to your survey's primary goal. If a survey taker sees too many required questions, especially on the first page, your abandon rates will skyrocket.

7. Avoid overloading table (matrix) and multiple choice questions. Always remember that you need to make sense of your survey data in the end. If you offer too many multiple choice options in a question or table, acting on that data becomes difficult.

8. Remember to include "Not Applicable." This is a common mistake, especially on required questions. If you don't offer respondents a way out on a question that truly doesn't apply, they may choose another answer -- giving you a false positive for that choice.

9. Get personal -- within limits. Whenever you ask for personal information (email address, phone number, etc.), include a link to your privacy policy and tell the customer why you are asking for the information. And, if you are updating a member or customer database, pre-populate questions and ask the respondent to update inaccurate information.

Implementation

11. Test your survey. Virtually every survey system lets you reset a survey's responses to zero, so don't be afraid to really test your survey. Complete several surveys yourself and have a test group (internal or external) do the same. Also, run reports on this test data and make sure the information you're collecting is actionable.

12. Use your survey software to collect suggestions on the survey itself. When testing, a nifty trick is to include a open-text area at the bottom of survey pages. Ask your testers to enter their comments, corrections and suggestions into this text area. This encourages testers to submit a complete survey, rather than just glancing at it, and it organizes all of your feedback. (Just don't forget to remove the comments area before launching!)

13. Design feedback surveys ahead of time and trigger them automatically. This takes some of the burden off your shoulders and allows you to concentrate on other aspects of the survey.

14. Give respondents some type of benefit. Remember, no one is forcing the respondent to fill out the survey, so offer an incentive for completing the survey. This could be something as simple as sharing the survey results with the respondents.

15. Act on negative feedback (Links to an external site.). Your survey software should be able to trigger an immediate email when it records negative feedback. Have the email sent to an appropriate party, such as the customer's account rep.

16. Don't be fooled by "high" abandon rates. Even if you follow all the above tips, your abandon rates may exceed your expectations. Remember, if one person visits the survey three times and completes it the fourth time, that is counted as three abandons and one completion.

Create Surveys for Free

Survey Tools

UK Data Service Variable and Question Bank, a great resource for:
- Social and economic researchers, wishing to find survey questions and search questionnaires as part of their ‘pre-analysis’
- Commissioners/managers of social research, working in all sectors, interested in seeing whether and how questions on their topics of interest have been framed in other surveys
- Teachers of survey methods (see Learning and teaching zone) with a specific interest in questionnaire design/methodology (see Data collection zone) Ph.D./postgraduate students