A good survey response rate can be tricky to achieve.

You know your respondents are busy people, and you’ve heard that a proliferation of surveys has led to ‘survey fatigue’.

Yet your clients’ feedback is critical to the continued funding of your project. 

Remember the last time you received an email asking you to ‘complete a quick survey’, or you opened an envelope to find a questionnaire inside, or you answered the phone to hear the dreaded “Please could you spare a few minutes…”.

How did you feel?

The trick to getting a good survey response is to put yourself in the shoes of the recipient. Then you can identify what would make you (ie your respondents) more motivated to participate.

Three tried and tested strategies to increase your response rate

1. Provide an incentive

People are busy, they need a good reason to give up time to answer your questions. Providing an incentive is a good ‘carrot’ to attract people who may be swithering whether or not to take part in your survey.

Incentives can take many forms: from money to vouchers to goods to a free service or subscription

• Check your organisation/funders policy on incentives – if it excludes spending money on them, either find something you can offer ‘in kind’, or get an organisation or business to donate the incentive.

• Consider the target group for your survey, and brainstorm a list of things they would value. I have used gift vouchers, money, books, and a free session.

• Describe your incentive in an attractive way, and highlight it early on in the Introduction to your survey.

2. Make it easy

The easier your questionnaire is to complete, the more people will fill it in. Any barriers provide an excuse to ‘put it on one side’. We heard of a researcher who received a questionnaire 6 years after the close of the survey!

• Start with a question which is very easy to respond to.

• Use ‘tick box’ responses for the majority of questions.

• For postal surveys, provide a ‘post paid’ return envelope.

3. Keep it short

The shorter your survey, the more responses you are likely to get. This is particularly the case with a printed questionnaire, where the respondent can immediately see how ‘long’ it is.

• Test your questionnaire with a few ‘real’ respondents to find out how long it takes to complete. If it’s more than 10 minutes consider pruning your questions (though an acceptable time will vary for different audiences).

• Include the time the questionnaire will take to complete in the Introduction to the survey.

• Be creative with layout to make the questionnaire look ‘short’.

The bottom line: By providing an incentive, and making your questionnaire quick and easy to complete, you will increase the number of people who respond. This in turn makes the feedback from your survey more robust.

Once you’ve chosen your survey method, and developed your list of questions, it’s tempting to get right on with the survey.

However well you and others have thought out your survey, there’s bound to be at least one glitch to resolve. Much better to take the time to identify them at the beginning than find them after you have run your full survey.

Whatever your survey method – phone interviews, face to face interviews, printed questionnaire or online survey – here are seven pitfalls you’ll want to avoid.

1.    The wording of a question doesn’t work

Interviewers will quickly tell you if the wording of a questionnaire isn’t working, because respondents will have asked for clarification. For self-completion surveys, you can tell you need to improve the wording if you get unexpected responses to a question, or perhaps no responses at all.

For example, it may become apparent the age bands: 18-25, 25-30, 30-40, over forty overlap, and should be 18-25, 26-30, 31-40, over 40.

Other problems could be: ambiguous questions, unclear questions, use of abbreviations respondents don’t understand, etc.

2.    A question is out of sequence

Some questions build on each other, or follow a logical sequence.

For example, if Q10 asks ‘Which of the following benefits did you receive from the scheme?’ it should come after Q12 which asks ‘Which scheme did you participate in?’

3.    The routeing doesn’t work

If your questions involve routeing, for example, ‘If No, please go to Q10’, there is potential for a mistake, especially if the questionnaire has been through a number of drafts with changes in the numbering of questions.

Online surveys have the scope for more sophisticated routeing (called ‘logic’ in Survey Monkey), and consequently more scope for this type of error.

4.    Questions overlap

If you get responses like, ‘see Q3 above’, you probably need to rationalise overlapping questions.

For example, if you ask ‘What suggestions do you have to improve the scheme?’, and later ask ‘Do you have any further comments?’ when it comes to analysis, suggestions will appear under both questions. The solution might be to amend the second question to ‘Do you have any further comments, not answered by previous questions?’, or if there were few responses, to delete the second question altogether.

5.    Generating hundreds of ‘Other’ responses to categorise

If you devise questions with multiple choice responses (which are good because they are quick to analyse), it’s often necessary to include an ‘Other’ box at the end. A pilot is a good opportunity to review the ‘Other’ responses, and extend the list of multiple choice responses. This saves a lot of time categorising responses later on.

6.    Your survey data can’t easily be analysed

As well as collecting data, a pilot should also analyse the data, to check the analysed data makes sense.  For example, analysis of your pilot data may show there are very few responses to one of the choices in a multiple choice list, so it should be excluded.

7.     There’s a glitch in the logistics of your survey method

A university piloted its online students survey, and wondered why only males had responded. It turned out the email list of students had a filter by sex, and this had been ‘turned on’ when the pilot list was sent out!

However straightforward your survey method may seem, it’s only by testing that you can be sure it works. In my experience the glitches are usually small things, but they could have significant consequences.

The bottom line: Piloting your survey  will help you resolve any glitches, thus saving time in your main survey, ensuring your results are robust, and perhaps avoiding an error which would invalidate your survey results.

The prospect of developing a questionnaire can be daunting

The good news is that lots of people have been there before you, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel!  Various online survey tools have captured this experience, making it very easy for a beginner to design a questionnaire, and also saving time for those experienced in designing surveys.

Whether your survey is to be online, a phone survey, or a postal survey, it’s well worth using a survey design tool to develop your questions. Then, if need be, you can transfer them to a printed version.

The tool I use, and thoroughly recommend to my clients, is Survey Monkey, which you can find at www.SurveyMonkey.com. It’s even free for up to 10 questions and up to 100 responses. Beyond that there’s a very affordable monthly fee, which you can end at any time.

Five ways Survey Monkey slices chunks out of questionnaire design time

1. Sample question types

When you ‘Add’ a question, there’s a drop down list of question types to choose from. For example: multiple choice,  rating scale, textbox etc.

If you’re not sure which type of question you need, simply click on ‘Examples’ to see what each question type looks like.

2. Automatic layout

Suppose you’ve chosen to use a multiple choice question. You simply enter the question, and the possible responses. Hey Presto! Survey Monkey automatically lays it out for you.

3. Easy to change the question type

Once you see your question you may decide multiple choice isn’t right; a rating question would be better. Simply change the question type, and you’ll be prompted to add your rating categories eg low, medium, high. The layout is changed instantly.

4. Easy to reorder questions

As you develop your questionnaire, the chances are you’ll realise, for example, that question 9 about the type of training undertaken, needs to come before question 8 which asks their opinion of the training. No problem – just ‘drag and drop’, and the questions are automatically renumbered for you.

5. Easy to circulate for feedback

You can quickly send your questionnaire to people for comment before you finalise it. Either send them the link to the online survey, or send them a PDF version which is easily printed.

When you have a questionnaire to develop, use an online survey design tool such as Survey Monkey. You’ll get ideas for question types to use, and progress much more quickly and with more flexibility than you ever could using word processing.

Project managers usually say to me: “No problem, we can give you a list of clients/businesses/providers to use for the survey”.

Imagine you’ve been asked to book a restaurant in a strange town for your group’s dinner. And they agreed they would prefer Greek. You trawl through Yellow Pages, but can’t find a Greek restaurant, so you go for Thai instead. How embarrassing when you find a Greek restaurant right next to the Thai one! It turns out you were using an old edition of Yellow Pages.

Similarly for your list, it needs to be robust to give you a representative sample of feedback from your survey.

Three ways to ensure your list is robust

1. Ensure it’s up to date

It’s easy to check the date of Yellow Pages. But what about a list of businesses on a website, or from your organisation’s database?

• It’s surprising how many lists have no dates. So you may need to do some investigation to check the source of the list.
• If it’s a year or more old, you will probably need to update it. It’s a good idea to check how the list was collated in the first place, so you can follow the same process.

2. Ensure it’s comprehensive

• Check your list includes the full range of people you want to consult.
  Suppose you need to contact a sample of people from the construction sector. Your list will need to include builders, joiners, electricians, plumbers etc. If for some reason your list has no plumbers, you will need to add them to the list, or your survey will not represent all the trades.
• Check your list represents the time period you want feedback from.
  If you seek feedback from your clients during the past two years, you need to be sure your list is complete for two years, so your sample will be a true representation of all your clients. If the first six months of your project are missing, your sample will not represent the past two years.

3. Eliminate any duplicates

When lists are updated, extended, or merged, there’s a real danger of introducing duplicates. If someone on the list is contacted twice they won’t have much faith in your project, and it’s a waste of your resources. Also, if you are drawing a sample from your list, your sample will be distorted by duplicates.

Far better to eliminate any duplicate entries first! Here’s how:

• Use the ‘Sort’ facility in Word, Excel or other software to put your list into alphabetical order.
• Scan your list for duplicate entries.

To ensure your list forms a robust basis for your survey, you need to check that it’s up to date, comprehensive and free from duplicates. Then you can be confident your survey has a firm foundation.