3 Steps to Organizing a Successful Survey - Lesson Learned

Introduction: Lessons Learned

When it comes to surveys, there is more involved than merely jotting down a few simple questions and asking random people. There are three basic but mandatory steps involved in organizing a successful survey: planning, composing, and running. In order to maximize the response rate and usefulness of responses, careful planning combined with the proper knowledge is a necessity.

The Lessons Learned white paper is the result of in-depth data harvesting. It reflects a generalization of how people have responded in the past and can be used as a guide while you create your survey. Throughout the document, each step is addressed individually with detail about the actions necessary to complete each step.

Part I: Planning your Survey

In the construction industry, successfully building a safe, reliable, and sturdy structure requires that blueprints always be designed first. The same applies to building surveys. Before you begin writing questions, create your own "blueprint". Write down the goals you wish to accomplish by running this survey. Then, decide on the type of survey you wish to create. Finally, decide on the degree of anonymity you wish to maintain. Successful planning is a necessary step for a successful survey.

First, write down your goals. By writing down your goals, you have a defined point of focus. Sticking to your goals while you write your survey will help keep your survey more refined. Also, it will help you to obtain an optimal length and avoid including things that don't necessarily relate to what you're trying to accomplish.

Next, you must choose which type of survey is right for your needs. There are three main types of surveys: Knowledge Acquisition, 360, and Team Rater. Which one is right for your needs depends on your goals.

Knowledge Acquisition surveys are polls. They involve harvesting the opinion about an item, and are very one-dimensional. If your goal is to obtain the opinion about an event, goal, idea, etc., then a general Knowledge Acquisition survey is right for you.

A 360 survey is designed to help staff members gain a better understanding on how they perform from multiple perspectives. It involves 2 groups of people: participants and respondents. First, the participant completes a self-evaluation; then chooses people that he/she feels could provide useful feedback. Those people, called respondents, complete the survey giving feedback to the participant. If your goal fits with "I would like to help individuals gain a better understanding of their performance from multiple perspectives and how it compares to their self-evaluation," then perhaps a 360 survey is right for you.

The Team Rater is like a 360, only it is targeted to a team, a group of people who work together. It is designed to help gain understanding on how team members compliment each other. Each team member completes a survey for every other team member, but unlike the 360, they don't complete a self-survey. If your goal fits with, "I would like to help a team better understand how they compliment each other, giving them knowledge of areas where they can improve", then the Team rater is a great solution for you.

Finally, you need to consider how anonymous you would like the respondents of your survey to be. Anonymity is important because it greatly reduces bias. People are instinctively concerned with what others may think of the feedback they give, so they pad their response to conform to expectations. When people know that their responses are going to be kept anonymous, they are more likely to give honest feedback. Keeping the results anonymous will enhance the quality of the feedback received.

Keep in mind, however, there are certain circumstances where anonymity is not possible and can be dismissed. In the case of a 360 survey, for example, anonymity from the manager is sometimes impossible as some individuals only have one manager. In this case, it is ok to have the manager's response not anonymous; it is generally a manager's job to communicate the performance of the individual he or she is manager over. However, you should still maintain anonymity for other relationships in a 360 survey.

Part II: Composing your survey

Now that you've properly planned for your survey, it's time to get down to business and compose it. To compose a survey, you need not only to write questions, you also need to craft effective invitation and reminder messages, as well as a welcome and a finished message. If you are running a 360 survey, you'll need two versions of each: one for the participant, and one for the respondent (the person giving feedback for the participant). To ensure these items will obtain optimal results, there are several critical elements to be considered.

When composing your questions, compose them as if you were asking them face-to-face. Additionally, you should always follow these important tips.

• To preserve anonymity, avoid demographic questions that will reveal the identity of the respondents.
• Avoid acronyms, jargon, and abbreviations. If your audience doesn't understand the question, they can't respond to it correctly.
• Avoid ambiguous questions and or vague words that have multiple meanings.
• Write clear, specific questions that are to the point, discarding unnecessary words. For example, don't write questions that contain multiple thoughts. Instead of "Does he perform well on the job and promptly meet deadlines", break it down to two questions: "Does he perform well on the job" and "Does he promptly meet deadlines".
• Avoid questions with an unbalanced response scale. For example, rather than the scale "Disagree; Agree; strongly agree", use "Strongly disagree; disagree; neither disagree nor agree; Agree; strongly agree".
• Questions should never contain double negatives. Instead of "His comments in meetings aren't unnecessary" use "His comments in meetings contribute to the agenda".
• Get to the point and stay with it. Write questions that are relevant to your goal. It is important to maximize the usefulness of your audience's time; your audience should be able to clearly see an association between the purpose of the survey and the questions asked.
• Keep the survey short. Try to keep it between 25-40 questions, taking no longer than 20 minutes to complete.

Another thing to consider is the order that your questions are asked in. You may wish to randomize them to help eliminate bias. One advantage of Internet-based surveys is that vendors such as Learning Bridge can do this automatically for you-each participant will see the questions in a random order, something not possible to do in paper-based surveys.

When composing your invitation and reminder messages, welcome and finished screens, there are some important elements to consider. Each message should be informative, short, and personal. Paying attention to these things will contribute to the success of your survey.

Invitations and Reminders should include the following:

• E-mail Subject Line - This should contain the purpose of the e-mail summarized to a few words. To create a sense of urgency, use the words RESPONSE REQUESTED or FEEDBACK REQUIRED. Putting words in capital letters helps them stand out more
• From-Address - You can specify the e-mail address the invitations come from. The respondent e-mail invitation is more likely to be read if it is from someone that the respondent knows, rather than from the online survey vendor.
• Deadline - The survey deadline should be near the top of the e-mail body, people will be more likely to see it. Additionally, putting 'YOUR FEEDBACK MUST BE SUBMITTED BY' in all capitals will help the deadline stand out more.
• Anticipated time to take survey - It is courteous to predict how much time the survey will take. If your survey involves lots of typing (comment responses), you may wish to give audience estimated time to complete multiple choice answers and direct answers only, and inform them that the comments will take longer.
• Purpose of Survey - Communicate to your audience what the feedback will be used for, and how it will affect them. For example, "This feedback will be used to help evaluate our team efficiency and will not affect your grade." If this invitation is for a 360 and directed to a Respondent (somebody giving feedback to a Participant), then you should include "You are providing feedback for [Participant Name]."
• Anonymity - Briefly tell your audience if the responses are anonymous. If there are circumstances where they are not anonymous, it is important to tell your audience before hand where their answers will not be held anonymous.
• Include Instructions - In 360's, instruct your participants to complete the self-survey before adding respondents (people who give feedback to participants). This allows the participant to be familiar with the content of the survey before deciding whom he or she will invite to give feedback.
• How to access survey - Tell them where to go and what to do.

Next, compose the welcome screen and finished screen. The welcome screen should just welcome them to the survey and give a brief insight to the survey. Also, if applicable, survey instructions or definitions of terms could be included on this page.

The finished screen should express appreciation for their feedback. If applicable, inform them when they'll get there results, and include any additional instructions for them here.

It is important to keep the messages personal. People are much more responsive to messages that are personalized. Consequently, use gender specific pronouns (he/she) and names wherever applicable.

Keeping the messages short should be another goal when designing custom messages. People tend to skim through messages and miss important information if they are long.

Part III: Starting your Survey

All right, you've got this beautifully composed survey that has been planned from start to finish, you've carefully written the questions, and you're probably excited to get it running. Now, all you have left to do is to set an invitation date, a deadline date, set some reminder dates (or an interval, if you prefer), and invite the right people to come take your survey. Sounds easy, right? It is, but there's a little science behind getting a good response rate.

First, let's begin with setting an invitation date. A common misconception in the survey world is that Mondays are a terrible day for to send out invitations. The reason behind the misconception being people are just getting back from a 2-day break from work, they have a million messages and things to do to catch up. Consequently, they are far too busy to pay attention to a little invitation in their inbox inviting them to give feedback.

You might also look at it the other way around -There are equally as many people that are just getting to work from a break after they've put their projects to a stopping point the Friday before. They're refreshed, ready to go, and have time to deal with other things before they pick up their major projects again. However, be sure to use your own judgment-there may be other circumstances of your target audience that you may wish to take in to consideration, such as a major project deadline coming up.

You should always set a deadline before you start a survey, simply because a survey without a preset deadline will never come to a close. If you want to wait until you get 100% response rate, you'll miss out on valuable weeks where you could be putting that data to use. On top of that, procrastinators will wait until just before the deadline to do the survey, so by setting an earlier deadline you'll get a higher response rate. 2 ½ weeks to 4 weeks has proven to be plenty of time to get a good response rate. Also, closing on a Wednesday is beneficial because it closes after the two most responsive days, Monday and Tuesday.

One trick that has proven to be effective in the past is to set the deadline a week earlier than you need it to be. Then, if you don't have enough data by the time that deadline approaches, extend it by a week. By doing this you give the procrastinators another chance to do the survey, and they will usually come around the second time.

E-mail reminders have also proven to be an effective tool in stimulating response. The truth is, the first time people are told to do something, they often put if off because they're busy with other things. Next, they forget about it. In most cases, they'll need to be reminded a few times before they do it.

When scheduling your reminder dates, you have two options of how to go about it. You can use set reminder dates-specified dates that reminders will go out. Another way is to set a reminder interval, so the user is reminded every X number of days after he or she received the invitation to complete the survey. Each has its advantages.

If you choose to set specified reminder dates, space your reminder dates at least three days apart, and schedule them to remind on alternate days of the week (e.g., remind Thursday, Monday, Friday, then Tuesday). Also, avoid sending out reminders on Saturday and Sunday, as these are the least responsive days. The advantage to using specified reminder dates is that you have more control over the survey. Set reminder dates work well for Knowledge Acquisition and Team Rater surveys because all participants and respondents in the survey are usually added on the same day. In a 360 survey, where respondents are added over several days, set dates do not work as well. For example, a respondent might be invited to complete a survey on a Wednesday and then receive a reminder message the very next day, just because that happened to be the set reminder date.

If you choose to use a reminder interval, it should be between three to six days. Five days is an excellent choice and has proven to be work well in the past. Reminder intervals are nice because they're easier to set up and the reminders are set out in relation to the day the respondent was invited. The disadvantage is you don't have as much control.

Finally, invite your audience. The invitations are sent out as soon as you enter an email address, so enter the names and e-mail addresses of the people you wish to respond the night before you want them to get their invitations. This way, they'll get them in the morning, while they are starting their day.

Now that you've set an invitation date, a deadline date, reminder dates or an reminder interval, and have invited your audience, sit back and watch the survey run. You'll get your results a few days after the survey closes.

Conclusion: Interpreting Your Results

When you get the results from your survey, you should use the data as a guide to making decisions. Don't let the data make decisions for you. It is important to keep in mind that the survey process is not perfect, people may not tell the whole truth and survey bias may be in play. You should always temper decisions with common sense and experience.

Also, you should consider running the same survey multiple times. Running a single survey will give you a snapshot of what you are looking for, but running the survey again will give you a historical capture of what you’re looking for. Being able to see a history of survey results will enable you to see how the actions taken have affected the results.

Making Extra Money With Online Paid Surveys - Tips on Joining Legitimate Survey Panels

How to Make Money Online at Home

This is probably the most commonly asked question on the internet for years. Making money online is probably a misunderstood topic for many people thinking that they must commit long term to see good revenue. This is true if you are selling stuff on eBay, or if you build your own website or start blogging to make money that require investing a lot of time as well as money, patience, passion about the topic, and experience / knowledge of how to bring traffic to your website or blog. It may pay off at the end by generating revenue from Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher, Kontera, or other advertisement products. You can also join well known reputable affiliate programs like Amazon, or affiliate networks such as Commission Junction and ShareASale, and advertise their products on your website or blog. Other making money online opportunities that require investing a lot of time is to consider writing articles to sites like Examiner, Associated Contents, HubPages, and Squidoo; or to consider home freelancing to sites such as FreeLancer, iFreeLance, and GoFreeLance.

However, online paid surveys are probably the easiest and the most time effective way of generating extra money online. This can be a side activity that generates a steady income of more than $200 that will definitely help you and your family in the current weak economic conditions. Joining online survey panels do not require any upfront investment, experience, or long-term commitment. Online paid surveys would be an ideal situation for housewives, unemployed people, part-time workers, college students, retirees, or anyone who can commit at least 40 hours per month. However, the internet has hundreds and may be thousands of websites that are actually scams. This article describes some tips and advice on selecting the legitimate survey panels that are right for you and avoiding scams.

How much Money can you make from Online Paid Surveys?

That depends on your free time, survey length and compensation, and your strategies for maximizing your potential earnings. Compensation for taking a survey can range anywhere from $1-$8 or even more depending on the topic, product, or service under evaluation. A survey generally takes around 5-45 minutes to complete, the longer it is the higher is the compensation. Many surveys offer $2 incentive for 20 minutes length which seems to be the standard. You will probably spend 10 minutes to get qualified for a survey, so you can complete two surveys in one hour. Assuming you can commit 60 hours per month, then you can earn about ($2 / survey) x (2 surveys / hour) x (60 hours / month) or an average of $240 per month from the comfort of you home. This figure may increase knowing that some online survey panels pay more than others, and that hot topics such as new technology and internet usually pay an average of $5 for 20 minutes length surveys.

Tips for Joining Online Survey Panels

Tip #1 - Be aware of Scams

• Many survey websites are scams just to get your information to sell to third parties.
• You should never pay a fee to join an online survey panel. Most sites that require payment to join are usually scams.
• Remember that "if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is a scam".

Tip #2 - Join Legitimate Survey Panels

• Join only legitimate online survey panels that pay, and that do not deceive their survey takers. To spot a legitimate survey site, look at their privacy policy and make sure that they will not release your information to a third party.
• Most respected legitimate survey panels are members of the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, CASRO, which requires members to adhere to the CASRO Code of Standards and Ethics for Survey Research, which is a tough, internationally-cited set of standards that has long been the benchmark for the industry.
• The CASRO code allows survey panels to ask for personal information such as name, age, marital status, number of children, address, annual income, hobbies, etc., in order to build a database of people and their demographic information, so that they can match potential survey takers with the product or service being under evaluation or study. However, the code requires survey panels to keep personal information strictly confidential.
• Other survey panels adheres to the principles set forth in the Safe Harbor framework as established by the United States Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of personal data provided from the European Union.
• Legitimate survey panels will never ask you to purchase a product, service, or a trial offer that requires using your credit card.
• Legitimate survey panels will never ask you to provide your credit card or bank account information, Social Security number, or your PayPal password. They will never try to recruit you via unsolicited e-mail or pop-up ads with survey questions. They will never contact or seek personal information from your children under 13, or ask them to take an online survey without your prior consent.

Tip #3 - Use a Separate Email Account

• Do not use your personal or business email accounts when signing up for online survey sites.
• Use a separate email address specifically for taking online surveys.

Tip #4 - Add Panel Email Address to your Safe Sender List

• You may not be getting survey invitations in your Inbox folder as your email provider filter may be flagging them as Spam and deleting them, or moving them to your Bulk or Junk folders.
• To ensure that you receive all survey invitations, add the email addresses of all survey panels to your list of trusted senders, address book, or contact list.

Concluding Remark

Taking online paid surveys can be a side activity that generates a steady monthly income if you can commit 40-60 hours per month earning $200-$300 at the comfort of your home. The internet has hundreds of websites that are actually scams which charge you a fee to send you a list of survey panels or sell your information to third parties. However, you can join top online survey panels listed on free websites reviewing legitimate panels.