By Laura Morales, JVA Consulting

 

Surveys, surveys, surveys.

Every organization and business is asking for you to complete an online survey. Whether you are at Best Buy buying a computer charger or Wal-Mart buying pet food, surveys appear on every receipt and by eager employees ask for your help in proving you had a positive experience.

With this influx of surveys in everyone’s daily life, how can you or your organization get valid input from clients, community members, or stakeholders? Based on experience in survey creation, distribution, and analysis at JVA, I have learned to live by the following five points.

 

Five survey guidelines

  1. Keep it simple. Avoid jargon, avoid acronyms, and avoid technical words that someone in your daily life would have to look up. Keep the literacy level low to take the survey, no matter your audience. By keeping your survey language simple, you will ensure that all can take the survey without having to overthink or overcomplicate, a thing.
  2. Keep it short. How long is your attention span for surveys? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? Does it depend on how interesting the topic is to you? Consider all of these factors in the perspective of those who will be taking the survey. Do not allow the survey to take over 20 minutes to complete.
  3. Keep it focused. It is extremely easy to make surveys overly complicated, because there are so many questions that you want to ask your community! Stick to ONE or TWO key topics for the entire survey. These should be your guiding themes, so do not stray off of them.
Scott Brown, Flickr

Similarly, questions asked within the survey should only ask one thing at a time. If you ask “which fruit do you like best and where do you buy your fruit?” in an open-ended question, you will have too many complicated answers to sort through. Instead ask “which fruit do you like the best from the list below” and later, “where do you most often buy fruit?” This will ensure that all respondents are answering on the intended question.

  1. Paid surveys? While you may not have the capacity to provide payment or coupons for every survey taken, there are creative ways to increase response rates through alternate incentives. Offering a raffle for an item, such as an iPad or Kindle Reader, can provide a greater incentive that offering nothing in exchange for one’s time. Consider the time and burden on your potential survey respondents, and ask them what would be a worthy incentive.
  2. Online surveys? Online surveys must always be considered first. Even if you think your community does not have access to computers or smart phones at home, is there an alternate place or manner in which they could take the survey? Is your community ever in one place where you can distribute volunteers with the survey displayed on a tablet for people to take? Online surveys allow for easier data collection (avoiding the need for tedious data entry after the survey closes) and many survey platforms offer basic analysis for you, so you have less to do after.

 

Surveys are everywhere. Yet, once you think through who is taking your survey, and what will inspire them to click on your survey, you are at a running start. There are many other nuances and details that should be considered in creating, distributing, and analyzing surveys, but the best process is to understand that before you attempt to reach out to your community, not after.

Do you need to find out what your donors, members or clients are thinking? JVA can help you design and analyze a survey that will get you the critical information you need to make decisions. Click here or call 303-477-4896.