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Presented by:

SurveyGizmo Online Academy

Surveys: What Are They?

•  Who – Marketers, Market Researchers, Anyone doing surveys, You!

•  What:

– Good survey design methodology

–  Important Design factors

– Communicating with Stakeholders

•  Why?

This Training – Who, What, and Why

•  A survey is a collection of questions asked repetitively to a sample of a population to mathematically derive characteristics of the total population.

Surveys: What Are They Good For?

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Great Survey Design Cycle Why is This Cycle Important?

•  It’s a framework

•  It provides guidelines and reminders as you work with clients and stake-holders

•  You’re likely doing parts of it already

•  Those are likely the parts of your process that work!

Why is This Cycle Important?

Unit 1: Need

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The Trifecta: Need, Design & Act Needs: We All Have Them

•  Questions to ask:

– What are we trying to figure out?

– What kinds of reports or data do we want or expect?

– What will we do with this data when we’re done?

– Who is our intended audience or population?

– How are you going to access the target audience?

Examples of Need

– How well known is my brand?

– Will customers buy this product?

–  If we offer X benefit, will our employee happiness go up?

– Why are my customers not converting?

– Will my product do well in a new market?

Why do companies do surveys?

•  Companies want to expand into new territories

•  Needs come from the business owners, department managers, and (in great organizations) the employees themselves

•  Someone wants proof of their intuition (this is an obstacle for you)

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Set Your Goals and Objectives

Set a Survey Goal

•  Setting goals and objectives for a survey

– Define your goal. A goal is not a single learning point – a goal is what you are going to do with this data, and why.

• Good goal: grow your company into new markets. (“A survey will determine which markets are good for our existing products.”)

• Bad goal: make more money for your business.

Learning Objectives

•  Determine your learning objectives

– These should all support your overall need and goal

– A good amount of learning objectives: three

– You should have no more than five!

Brainstorm Your Questions

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Good Brainstorming Techniques

•  Let everyone brainstorm on their own separately for 5 minutes.

•  Make sure that everyone gets a chance to be heard.

•  Have a scribe to make sure you capture all ideas

•  Let ideas flow freely

•  Remember that there are no bad ideas

Note which ideas Stakeholders suggest

Selection and Refinement

Review What You’ve Done

•  Working with a committee can often greatly dilute your original need.

•  Choose the questions you really need to ask!

•  Make sure everything ties back to the survey goal.

123 ABC  $$$  

Eye on the Prize: ROI

•  If you are going to spend more time and money on running the research for this need than the overall completion of goals would generate, it’s a waste of time and money

•  If there is no ROI measurement, there is no encouragement to take action

•  Without communication from the start about possible actions to take, survey results may have no obvious meaning

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Unit 2: Design

What type of bug did you eat yesterday? *

o  Ant

o  Caterpillar

o  Spider

What type of bug did you eat yesterday?

30

20

50

Ant

Caterpillar

Spider

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The Four Horsemen of the Surveypocalypse Lack of Focus

•  Covering too many diverse topics

•  Additional questions that do not meet the survey goal

•  Questions that are not inline with the learning objectives

•  Questions that do not derive actionable results

Emotional Bias

•  Asking loaded questions

•  Asking neutral-seeming questions on a loaded topic

Option Bias

•  Required, non-applicable questions

•  Leading or restrictive options

•  Different types of scales

•  Option lists of death

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Identity Bias

•  “How much do you love SurveyGizmo?”

•  Asking “Do you like SurveyGizmo?” with a SurveyGizmo logo in the corner of the survey

Conversational Bias

•  Surveys as a conversation

•  Respondents giving the answer they think you want to hear

Miscommunication

•  Know your audience and the language that they use and understand

– Avoid technical terms unless it is appropriate

– Define terms if necessary

•  Remember to speak in your company’s voice

•  Have a peer review for clarity

Survey fatigue as a cultural trend

•  Cultural survey fatigue

– The average respondent is fatigued already, just by nature of:

• Receiving emails from organizations

• Suggestions on receipts and from cashiers

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Why is Survey Fatigue an Issue?

•  Companies like SurveyGizmo

•  DIY survey software: the fact that anyone can run a survey is a blessing and a curse.

•  The easier it is, the less thought that goes into the execution.

•  Good surveys are never a waste of time.

•  Mediocre or bad surveys are always a waste of time.

Organize Brainstorm

Organize Your Brainstorm

•  Organize brainstormed ideas into groups based on their objectives and topic.

•  There may be some additional refinement that needs to be done at this point.

•  Organize your topic groups by:

•  Priority

•  Reporting use

Refine Brainstorm Ideas into Questions

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Guide: Writing Questions

•  Multiple choice versus open-text questions

– Quantitative versus qualitative

•  Phrasing and language use – unclear language, grammar, ambiguity can all be issues

– Remember that language can differ between demographic groups

•  Keep your questions:

– Brief - Simple

– Relevant - Specific and direct

Qualitative Versus Quantitative

•  You may introduce bias into your survey with every qualitative answer you ask, unless the resulting answers are discrete.

•  This data should never be added to quantitative data without the information being entirely clear in all reporting.

Guide: Exploratory Studies

•  Open-text questions

•  You should never have a required question that does not have an opt-out option (this creates bad data)

•  Try to avoid…

– Leading questions

– Loaded or suggestive questions (like our star rankings)

– Fatiguing question types – large tables, lots of open-text or essay questions

– Sensitive questions

– Highly technical language

Question Mistakes to Avoid

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Quick Recap

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