Course Evaluation Survey

When schedules are rushed and the pressure is building, it is easy to breeze through the set up of an online survey without much thought.  Just add the survey questions that your boss told you to ask and send out the survey invitations as quickly as possible.  However, it saves you time in the end to take the extra time when creating your survey.  I can tell you from conversations with survey designers who have rushed through their surveys, they end up grappling with reporting on survey results.  Had 10 minutes been spent thinking about the organization of their questions, and 20 minutes spent runing through the web survey in test mode to check out reports, hours of work could have been avoided.  Here are three quick steps to ensure your survey set-up is correct:

First of all, take a few minutes to think about the questionnaire's design - including the organization of survey questions.  For example, if you are creating a training survey evaluation, it is best to ask all the questions regarding the presenter and then move on to questions about the material, what the attendees learned and end with an open text box asking for suggestions for improvement.  Organizing your questions will actually decrease responder fatigue because they are focusing on one subject at a time, rather than going back and forth between topics.

Once you have the questions in the right order, look for any questions that are not relevant to all respondents.  If you have any questions which should not be answered by everyone, add survey question logic to your survey.  Whether you just change the formatting to include a few sub-questions or there is an entire branch of the survey only seen by a portion of respondents, this will make the survey experience as short as possible for all respondents.  Adding logic to your survey also makes reporting easier on you.  When looking at the results, you know that the questions regarding the cocktail hour with the speaker were only seen by those who participated in the activity.

Lastly, and most importantly, be sure to test your survey fully. This means filling it out a few times, even asking a colleague to do the same.  The first goal of this step is to ensure that the logics you have set up are working properly, but there is so much more!  Once you have collected 5 or more responses, go into the survey reports section and test out the reports.  The whole point of running a survey for data collection.  So you have to make sure you are collecting the data you set out to collect!  As mentioned earlier, interpreting and analyzing the survey data you collected can be easier when working with logic.  If you are in test mode and find that a question format is not returning the information you would like; make changes.  That is what test mode is for.  You do not even need to worry about the data you have collected in test mode.  We make it so easy to remove all test responses when activating your survey.

Even when you are down to the wire, try to take an extra 30 minutes and follow the steps listed above. However, if you need one final fail-safe to make sure your survey is set up correctly – give us a call!  Cvent's Web Surveys Client Services team members are happy to review your survey to make sure your questions are well organized, you are utilizing any necessary logics, and question formats appear to be correct.  Now, this review cannot take the place of you testing out the reports ahead of time, so don’t try to skimp out on that one!  But if you would like another set of eyes to give your survey one last look over, just let us know!  You can give us a call at 866.318.4357 or send in an email request for a survey review and we will get back to you within 24 hours.