Five tips to help boost your survey response rates! | The Data Coach | Nonprofit consultant

Transcript:

Hi there. My name is Lindsay. I'm The Data Coach, and today I'm going to give you five tips for increasing your survey response rates. Surveys are a great way for organizations to get feedback for program evaluations, needs assessments, for strategic planning, all kinds of things.

But I find that few things are more disheartening than when you spend all this time creating what you think is a really great survey, send it out, and all you hear are crickets, right? No one wants that. So if you're having this problem, or you've had this problem in the past and you want to avoid it in the future, here are five things that I suggest that can ultimately help you get the response rates that you're looking for.

So the first thing that I recommend is to make sure that you have a really clear and specific purpose to your survey.

What I generally tell my clients is that [00:01:00] they should make a list of maybe two to three questions that they want to answer through these survey responses. So if you're a program director, for example, you've just launched a new pilot, maybe you want to send out a survey to those program participants to see what they thought worked well about the program, what didn't, and what they would change in the future.

That's three things, right? Perfect. If our surveys are a little bit too broad, or we're not really clear on what we really want to know from the survey, we can end up with a lot of different questions about a lot of different things. And that can be confusing for your survey takers, and might be discouraging, and they end up not completing it in the way that you want.

Relatedly, please keep your surveys short. If you're doing an online survey through Google Forms or Typeform, whatever it is that you're using, I generally recommend keeping those surveys under 10 minutes to complete. [00:02:00] It's a lot more encouraging to get an email saying that this survey will only take you 5 minutes to complete, as opposed to 20, 25, 30.

That's way too much time for most people. There's a lot going on in their day. So get specific and keep it short. Third thing, really think about your target audience. Who are the people who can best answer your questions? As an example, if someone sends me a survey about how I keep my plant life thriving, I'm ignoring that email.

And the reason I'm ignoring that email is because in the fifth grade I accidentally killed our classroom plant. Apologies again to Mr. Stark, I'm still not entirely sure how I did that. And then in college I thought, surely I can keep a cactus alive, and I was wrong. The succulent behind you, if you can see it, that's fake.

I'm not really a great person to answer questions about thriving plant life. I'm not going to [00:03:00] respond to that email. So really think about, in terms of who's getting your survey, who has the most knowledge about the things that you're asking about and who was best suited to answer your questions in a really accurate, useful, and informative way.

The fourth thing that I would like for folks to consider a little bit more is accessibility, and I mean that in a few different ways. There's the obvious, making sure that your survey is accessible for people with disabilities. If you are using an online survey tool, most of those have accessibility checks in there that you can use to make sure that folks with, say, vision impairments will be able to take your survey.

But I also mean accessibility in terms of things like language. If your target audience is largely Spanish speaking, but your survey is only available in English, you're going to run into trouble in terms of response rates because your audience can't understand the language that you presented them with.

[00:04:00] Another thing to think about is Internet accessibility, especially as we increasingly rely on online surveys, not everyone has constant internet access. Not everyone has an email address. So you really need to think about your audience, who they are, how they operate in the world, what they have access to and what they don't, and consider other formats that may work better for them.

Maybe it's making phone calls, maybe it's doing paper surveys, maybe it's hanging out at a library to grab people there. Again, this is stuff for you to think through for your community, what makes the most sense, but accessibility can be thought of in lots of different ways. Make sure you think all of your options through.

And then finally, don't be afraid to ask for help. If you're a nonprofit organization, you probably have organizational partners, you have funders, you have board members who all have a vested interest in seeing you succeed. So Ask them maybe to share your survey with their email list. Ask them to [00:05:00] maybe post some flyers in the neighborhood. Again, whatever makes sense for your audiences, but tap into the resources that you have available to really get that survey out there and try to boost those response rates as much as possible.

If you have a data question for your organization, please feel free to leave it in the comments and it could become the topic of our next video. Also, please subscribe to stay updated on videos as they come out and thanks so much for watching. See you soon.