Creating Follow Up Surveys to Get Results You Can Use.

Before closing the books on your event, a post-event survey can help guide
some of your future decision making. Web surveys are a powerful and cost
effective tool that aid in effective decision making, but they must be designed
in a way that ensures a good response.

Your first step is to determine the goal of your survey. If you don’t have a
measurable goal, the survey results will likely just be added to your
administrative clutter. Surveys often ask too many questions that provide
unnecessary information, so identify specific objectives before composing your
questions.

Once you have identified the goals of your survey, consider the following tips
to increase the rate of response to your survey.

Introduce the survey
Once a recipient opens a survey, they may still need some motivation to complete
the survey. Consider a short cover letter introducing the objectives of the
survey and why it is important to receive the recipient’s feedback. This is also
the opportunity to establish trust by ensuring that the recipient’s information
will be kept confidential or if you choose, anonymous.

Offer an incentive
Even the best executed survey may leave you wondering why you had a poor
response. A small incentive can go a long way so ask yourself if you have
something that you can give away. Perhaps you can offer a discount, a free item,
a bit of information or some other enticement to motivate recipients to respond.

Keep it short and simple
In general, people are not motivated to complete long surveys so keep it simple
and as attention grabbing as possible. Preferably, pique the respondent’s
interest by placing more interesting questions at the beginning of the survey.
Give careful thought to the structure of questions and cover a single topic with
each question, keeping them short and unambiguous. Avoid jargon unless you are
sure that your audience understands it and stick to simple wording.

Keep it logical
Once you have determined which questions are the most important, group the
questions into subsets and arrange them in a logical order on the survey along
with headings to orient the respondent. By doing so, you will reduce the risk of
respondents abandoning the survey due to frustration or lack of understanding.

Follow up close to the event date
The response rate and accuracy of surveys decrease the more the recipient has to
try to recall information. Send out your survey as close to the event date as
possible and try not to ask the respondent to recall too many specific details
that will require more reflection and time.

Set a cut-off date
While some people are simply slow to reply to emails, you can expect a good
percentage of your responses in the first 24 hours. Most responses are received
within the first five days so unless you know that a longer time frame is
suitable, a week is generally considered to be a reasonable cut-off. For best
success, avoid sending out your survey at the end of the week or on the weekend.
Tuesday mornings are considered optimal.

While it now may seem like setting up a survey is far too complicated, this
really isn’t the case and these are some simple guidelines to follow. Web
surveys are a very effective way to get information from your clients who are
already on-line and there is no better way to improve on your next event than to
ask the participants directly.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any
questions or comments about this article.

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