Online Survey Project

I’ve previously emphasized how important it is to consider survey reporting not only after you’ve collected data, but at the beginning and throughout a survey project.  Another central tenet of good survey reporting is tailoring your report or presentation to your audience.

The formatting of your market research reports and presentations can vary dramatically depending upon who is going to receive them.  Even the content will differ based on the audience(s) who will read the report or view the presentation.  Here are two big questions to ask yourself about your audience, so you can tailor your reporting tasks accordingly:

1) Is this a lay or technical group of people? 
The more professional your audience is, the more technical you want to be when describing the results.  For example, if you are sending survey results back to respondents, you probably don’t need to go into statistical and methodological detail.  If you are presenting to market research colleagues, on the other hand, you would go into fairly deep detail regarding topics such as statistical significance, margin of error/confidence level, as well as include prior research citations and an abstract of your project.

2) Am I presenting this to senior officials and/or executive decision-makers?
Usually, the higher-up the ladder your audience is, the less time you spend on detail.  So if your answer to the above question is "yes," I like to use a five-minute rule: if someone had to make major business decisions based on your survey results, what could you present in five minutes that would help them make good strategic decisions?  What would be the “take-home” message (i.e., two or three data-driven recommendations based on your results)?

Although surveys are usually single point-in-time snapshots, it’s good to draw basic conclusions unless it would be inappropriate to do so... after all, you’ve likely spent considerable time and effort for the survey project to generate useful insights!

Just last week I shared how expensive conducting paper surveys can be, particularly if it's a survey project run every quarter for benchmarking or trending analysis. But cost isn't the only benefit online survey questionnaires can have over the old fashion mail questionnaire. Here are a few other things to consider next time you're debating between an instant survey online and it's paper-based equivalent:

• Speed: Creating surveys online offers instant distribution via web links posted on your website and email survey invitations. When you make surveys online, you can see the responses begin rolling in immediately - not trickle in a week or two after you first put them in the mail. Don't discount how much quicker you can analyze survey data either, since response are collected online, there's no manual data entry.

• Efficiency: This benefit goes right along with speed. It's more efficient to design a survey online and collect feedback using the internet. It's also easier to copy, or clone, your surveys for repeat deployment. 

• More Thorough Responses: By utilizing survey technologies like email survey invitations, and survey reminders for both non-respondents and partial respondents, you can collect more thorough responses and improve the accuracy and validity of your survey data.

• Randomization of Answers: We shared our thoughts on the benefits of randomizing answer earlier today. To get caught up, read this post on when you should randomize answers. But in summary, randomizing answers helps decrease certain types of survey bias and makes your survey results more reliable.

• Improved experience: Paper surveys limit you in providing a less than excellent survey respondent experience. Remember, every interaction with a customer impact the overall customer experience - this includes completing surveys! Designing surveys online gives you the ability to use survey question logic such as skip, branch, link logic or other types of  advanced logic that improves the overall experience. Instead of having to write survey questions like, If yes, when was the last time you purchased Agent ABC? Instead, that question only shows when the respondent indicates they have purchased Agent ABC. Couple these types of question logic with pipe logic that makes the survey even more engaging (remember, more relevant and engaging the survey is, the higher he response rate will be).

Unfortunately for the mail survey, they just don't have these types of functionality. Luckily for all online survey builders out there, you can simply select a survey designing software (like the Cvent Web Surveys application), and start improving your survey programs while cutting costs.

With the emergence of widespread internet usage and powerful online survey software, the web has become the survey method of choice for many project managers and market research professionals.  Utilizing an online web survey design allows for levels of efficiency unheard of in traditional mail questionnaire projects, but it also poses new challenges for business survey researchers.  One of the questions that is asked often is, Is my customer feedback sample and/or survey data skewed because I used an online survey?

The answer could be either no, yes, or maybe, depending upon your specific research issues and target demographics.  The demographic that use the internet (and newer technologies in general) the most are younger people.  Those who are new to online technologies, or those who are not tech-savvy, might be intimidated or confused by a web survey form or an email survey invitation from an unknown sender, which can decrease your rates of nonresponse.  Also, you can run into the issue of coverage error for those who do not have internet access, which is more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals.

But overall, the reliability and validity of online survey results can be on par with or better than other modes, especially if you know your target audience well, including their rates of internet usage.  According to a September 2009 survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 77% of all adults - and 93% of those ages 18-29 - use the internet “at least occasionally.”  Less than half of those aged 65 and older use the internet or send and receive email, however.

So while there are drawbacks to online questionnaire designs of which you should be mindful (as there are with any survey modes, such as interviewer bias, etc.), the efficiency and reduced costs are more than enough rationale for most to employ online data collection techniques, either exclusively or as part of a multi-mode survey design.  Knowing and understanding your target audience is the best way to be sure that your chosen mode will produce quality data.

Surveys are an invaluable tool for researching the community attitudes, employee concerns, product needs, customer loyalty and priorities held by different groups or target audiences.  Designing a questionnaire and collecting survey responses from a sample allows us to draw a profile of the group as a whole, and perhaps perform some correlation analysis to understand the source of those feelings.  The online survey findings can then support fact-based organizational decisions or improvement projects to help continually improve the organization over time.

Survey research can be applied to many venues.  Here are just a few practical applications listed below:

An Internal Employee Survey could identify reasons for low employee retention and provide ideas for reducing those costs, such as a better designed benefit program, improved training opportunities, or problems in the way the organization functions.

A Training Survey can identify how a training program has improved the capabilities of some group and how the training program itself can be improved.  

A Product Satisfaction Survey can identify initial customer experiences with a product, providing data to address unforeseen problems and help the next product release.  

A Market Research Survey can identify customers needs when creating these new service and product offerings.  Surveys can be part of Design for Six Sigma activities.  

An Association Survey, which is similar to market research and customer surveys, can show the member benefits most of interest.

However, a survey program is only valuable if it is properly designed and executed.  While performing a survey project seems deceptively simple – it's just a bunch of questions, and survey software tools make electronic surveys quick and cheap – a small mistake in the survey questionnaire design or survey administration can skew or bias the data, leading to erroneous conclusions.  No organization should ever make critical business decisions based on unreliable or invalid data.

Bad data is worse than no data!

Within the survey research process, a "Thank You" note is something that is sent a few days to a week after a questionnaire is sent out to your clients. This mailing expresses appreciation for responding and indicates that, if the client survey has not yet been completed, it is hoped it will be soon.

The postcard or email survey "thank you" note is not written in order to overcome respondent doubts or fears about taking the survey, rather, it is meant to jog memories and help re-arrange priorities, bringing your potentially forgotten survey back to the top of potential respondent's "To-Do" pile.

If timely and appropriately worded, the postcard "Thank you" note can arrive just in time to make an appeal that engenders a sense of importance about survey participation, without crossing the line into sounding impatient.

When possible, attempt to have your "Thank you" note be as different as possible from your original survey invitation request for participation letter. The goal is to create a stand-out piece of paper or electronic mail that contrasts with others, creating new stimuli for your potential respondent.

Utilizing these survey tips in conjunction with adding a "Thank You" note to your survey project outline are just some of the ways you can ensure your products are recognized as standing out from the crowd, especially in this all-too-hectic world.

Cvent provides you simple survey tips as best practices that you can follow while working on your electronic survey project to ensure that the project is flawless. Mentioned below are some survey form best practice tips that will help you achieve this.

Anonymous Survey: If you are creating an anonymous survey, please carefully consider the fact that you will not be able to link the responses that you collect to any of the respondents on your targeted list. As soon as a respondent clicks on a link in your online survey email, that person is removed from your targeted list and all of his or her contact information is removed as well. When you run survey reports for an anonymous survey form, the respondents will be identified by unique response numbers that are not linked to any respondent contact information. Respondent contact information is removed from the response for a particular anonymous survey, however it remains in your Cvent address book.

Removing Identity Confirmation Page: You can also create a collect respondent contact information survey and hide the identity confirmation page from your respondents so that the survey appears anonymous to your online survey respondents. However, for this functionality to work in your electronic survey, respondents must access the survey via a link in an email survey invitation. If the respondents are coming through the generic website link, they must go through the identity confirmation page, as there is no way to know who is responding.

Brand your company: As a valued Cvent Customer, we have activated the custom header feature in your account for a custom online survey design. Please take advantage of your ability to customize the headers on your welcome page and survey body pages to include your own images, banners and logos.

Be clear about privacy protections: People are more comfortable sharing information on the internet if they know how it will be used. The welcome page or the first page of the survey is the place to include information about how you will be using people's survey responses. Are they anonymous? Confidential? Shared with others? A university human subjects statement, if needed, would go here.

Use Page Breaks: We recommend putting a maximum of 5-6 questions on each survey page in order to keep the page lengths short. Not only does keeping each page short help reduce the likelihood that a respondent will time out, but adding page breaks helps you to collect partial responses. Anytime a respondent clicks on a "Next" button, the responses entered previous to that button are saved. This ensures that any respondents who exit the online web survey before hitting the "Finish" button will be able to go back in and answer the remainder of the questions to complete the survey.

Progress Indicator Bar: Use a progress indicator bar to allow your respondents to see where they are in the survey and to inform them when they have completed the survey.

Survey Logic: Where possible, drill down for more information. The logic in the Cvent Web Surveys system makes this very easy to do. If someone selects a negative answer choice, add a sub question to probe them for details. Use branch logic to create paths within your survey that are only applicable to one group of respondents. Pipe logic allows you to personalize your survey by pulling an answer from a previous question into the question text of a follow-up question. Lastly, advanced survey question logic can be used to make a question visible to a respondent when specific criteria are met. These criteria can be based on respondent contact information, custom contact fields, or questions in the survey. When you are applying advanced logic, you can also turn on link logic, so that respondents only see certain answer options for one question, depending on how they responded to a previous question in the survey.

Have your respondents market your survey: Activate the survey invitation forwarding feature to allow your online survey respondents send an email invitation to friends or colleagues at the completion of the survey. The contact information collected will be automatically added to your address book for future surveys.

From Name in the emails: Always use a recognizable From Name in your emails as this drives your respondents to open the email. This is very important because without opening the email, your respondents will not be able to take the survey.

Use Multiple Email Campaigns: Send targeted email marketing messages to your audience in order to help increase survey response rates. Within one survey, you can send out different messages to different groups of people by segmenting your invitee list. This functionality allows you to specify the From Name, From Email Address, Subject Line of the email, and body of the email. Take advantage of this functionality and manipulate these variables in order to increase the open rate of your survey emails and your response rates.

We often get asked, "What is a good survey design?" All of these survey best practice tips are components to keep in mind when designing a questionnaire to ensure quality survey data. Watch out for more tips coming soon...

If you follow the bloggers on the Cvent Web Survey blog, you know we emphasize survey reporting concerns throughout the entire questionnaire project life-cycle.  This post outlines five general sections that comprise a good report or presentation for a survey research project.  By following this outline, you can be sure that you have a thorough summary of your research objectives, processes and results all in one place at the conclusion of your survey project.

Executive Summary
This is the "drive-by" version of the entire survey project.  It contains a brief summary of your main points, and predominately consists of broad research findings.  You can also think of this as the audience takeaway section: imagine if people had just five minutes to hear your results, and then had to make decisions based upon what they heard.  Include essential, bottom-line insights from your survey project here (and not much else).

Introduction/Background
In this section, you introduce your study, including its purpose, concepts, rationale and variable descriptions (where appropriate).  This is also the place to provide all the background information, as well as any prior research findings/citations upon which your current study is based.  If you have specific hypotheses, they can be placed here after you’ve established rationale.

Methodology
This is the part of the report where you get dirty with the details of how you went about designing and conducting your survey.  Descriptions of survey sampling procedures, survey question and response option/scale design, data collection activities and timelines all belong here.

Results
In the survey results section of your report or presentation, you provide all the survey findings.  This includes detailed tables, charts and other selected graphics that clearly explain what the data say, and can be quite extensive depending on how many survey questions (and research questions) you have.

Conclusion/Discussion/Recommendations
These sections can of course be listed separately, but I’ll group them together here for our general descriptive purposes.  This is where you take the step from findings to decisions.  You’ve detailed your results; now you draw conclusions, discuss anything that might have affected the research or your path forward, and make recommendations about where to go next based on the data.

Say you want to send out a particularly important website link in your survey emails leading to your website, a sponsor’s website or any other page on the internet with information you really want the respondents to visit. Now, you’ve designed different emails, but are wondering which one will be most effective – how do you find out? Click Tracking.
Here's another scenario. A sponsor is funding your online survey and wants to know how many people are actually clicking on their image and going to their website. They want to be able to track the ROI on their sponsorship – how will you do this? Click Tracking.

Click tracking is a powerful new feature in the Cvent email survey tool that is of invaluable importance to anyone who puts in website links in their survey emails. How does it work? When someone clicks on a link in an email, the information is first sent to Cvent and then the respondent is directed to the URL for the link.  Using click tracking, we can track how many times a link was clicked on uniquely, or in total, and at what date and time. Use any of the reports below to get exactly the data you want about who clicks on the link, when they click on it and how many times they clicked:


So the next time you decide to put in a link into a survey email, remember, it is not just a link but a vast source of information that lets you know your survey respondents' preferences, interests and usage. Happy Tracking!

Have a question? We're here to help! Here at Cvent we're always trying to help people improve their survey projects. Whether you're trying to write new employee feedback survey questions, create a customer service performance reviews or simply get a better understanding of how our online survey research software and enterprise feedback management solution works, we're happy to answer your questions!

To make it easy to get all your survey questions answered, we've added a chat to our blog. Someone will be happy to answer your questions during normal business hours (9am - 6pm ET). So go ahead, click to chat and ask our experts your questions about employee feedback software, data collection methods, customer survey questions, or any other survey questionnaire related question!

A year ago, the Cvent Web Surveys Blog posted it's first post. Over the past year, we've shared many survey best practices with you that can be applied to online surveys and paper questionnaires alike. Here's a list of some of our most popular posts:

• Tips For Providing Survey Incentives: We get asked all the time about incentives and their place in survey research. There are arguements for and against offering survey incentives. This post isn't about those sides. Instead, it focuses on tips for offering survey incentives if that's the path you choose to go down.

• Offering An Additional Comment Section Is An Online Survey Must: Simply asking for customer or employee feedback implies you're ready to make changes, you want to identify problems and fix them. If you fail to offer a "last ditch effort" with and additional comments (optional) question type, you could be making a huge mistake. Depending on your survey design, it may be the only place a survey respondent can give you truly honest, unprompted feedback.

• Survey Question Flow Impacts Survey Findings: Question order is an important part of good survey design. Whether it's a paper survey on customer satisfaction or an online questionnaire to gather employee feedback, how you order your survey questions could impact your survey findings.

• Survey Report Tips: Writing the Executive Summary or Setting the Stage: When writing a survey report, you can't just launch into the survey responses and the data collection results. You need to provide the report reader with some general background information about the survey project including why you ran the survey, what the goals were, what the data collection methods were. Then you can summarize the results and make recommendations.

• Five Steps to Begin Interpreting Online Survey Results: The hardest part of any survey project is creating the questionnaire. If you design a good survey and plan the analysis, interpreting the data should be a walk in the park. Make sure to review these five easy steps for analyzing survey data.

• Analyze Open-Ended Questions Faster with a Quick Trick: We all know using closed questions are easier to analyze. But sometimes they just don't cut it. This post gives you a quick six step process for how to analyze survey data quickly to summarize survey responses without spending days on the survey analysis.

• Difference Between Causation vs. Correlation in Survey Data: To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. This post aims to debunk the myth that correlations found in survey data means that one thing caused the other.

• What To Look For When You Move Your Online Survey To Test Mode: It's definitely an online survey best practice to move your web survey to test mode before sending it out to your survey sample. Make sure to use this 7 step checklist to avoid any online survey pitfalls.

• Market Research Process: 6 Steps to Project Success: When working on survey research projects - be it a customer satisfaction survey or product development survey or a staff performance review form - you should always follow this six step process to make sure you get the maximum return on investment from your survey project.

• Online Survey Question Pitfalls—And How to Avoid Them: This post points out common online survey pitfalls that are in surveys all the time. However, identifying problems with your work performance assessment or customer feedback questions is only half the battle.

Does it matter if not everyone takes your survey? What if only half your survey sample actually completes the survey questionnaire - or a third? You're never going to get everyone you invite to complete your survey. Those people conducting employee surveys, such as employee opinion surveys or workplace surveys will see the highest response rates on their survey projects. Some HR surveys see response rates as high as 90%. But if you're conducting a consumer survey, help desk satisfaction survey or customer feedback survey 90% response rates may be out of your reach.

The question remains, if I'm never going to get everyone, do those who didn't voluntarily complete your survey matter? Absolutely. Like with most things related to market research, there has been a lot of research to uncover the truth: are survey respondents different from non-respondents? It seems that research points to yes. Even early responders and late responders different, and this is probably due to interest in the survey.

There are a few things you can do to boost your response rates and limit your nonresponse bias.

1. Send email invitation reminders and partial response reminders to those on your email list. Two things happen when you do this, the first, you catch people who never even read your first email. The second benefit is you remind people who were willing to complete your survey but forgot about it.

2. Make sure there aren't any errors in your survey design. Double check your survey question logic, your question and answer choices, your graphical survey template, even your introduction on the survey welcome page.

3. Keep it short. This is a general survey best practice tip you should always follow. While there's not much you can do after you have already sent out email survey invitations and begun the data collection process, you should remember to keep your surveys short and limit the number of survey questions during the survey design phase.

It's important to keep non-response bias in mind when you're analyzing survey data and drawing conclusions from your market research results. Are your respondents different from your non-respondents? Perhaps only heavy users completed the survey, or only people with full time jobs, or only single individuals. Do those who opted not to complete your survey have a different opinion? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when evaluating your survey data. In some cases, it may not matter, in others it could cause you to make a decision based on skewed results.

When it comes to losing weight or saving more money, one of the most daunting aspects is simply wrapping your head around where to start. With hundreds of books and celebrity “experts,” it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you even begin.

Administering, writing and creating survey questionnaires is no different. Ask questions, send them out and let everybody respond? Sounds easy, right? Not always. What survey questions do you ask? How do you know what’s important to ask versus what’s going to produce a meaningless data point?

Just as people turn to financial advisers and personal trainers, Cvent's Web Survey software tool offers more than 170 expertly crafted survey questions and survey templates to help you overcome the inertia associated with getting the ball rolling on your next survey research projects. Our question library helps users create customer service satisfaction survey forms, write employee questionnaires or staff attitude surveys, design marketing survey templates, and more.

From this extensive library of questions, we have created 20 fully built survey templates including customer satisfaction survey templates, training evaluation samples and employee exit survey templates.

Although Cvent won’t take those first steps on the treadmill for you or stash those first few dollars in your proverbial piggy bank, we are able to leverage our extensive experience to help you initiate your first survey project with pre-built survey templates.

Sometimes a goal of employee feedback programs are to improve employee performance. Following the simple survey questionnaire tips and best practices we've shared before will help you collect the data you need to make tweaks to processes - or invent new programs - to improve employee satisfaction and productivity.

What are some of these human resource survey best practice tips?

• Collect anonymous survey responses. Make sure you select an online data collection tool with the option to collect contact information or collect anonymous surveys.

• Don't ask too many personal questions. If you're conducting an anonymous employee feedback forms, employees shouldn't feel like their responses could be tracked back to them. Asking what department they're in is one thing, but asking what department, what age group they fall into and their gender may be pushing it too far - besides, do you really need any demographic information?

• Ask questions about a third party. Asking questions in the third person can sometimes make the employee completing the web survey feel less threatened. Do your co-workers You may feel like your questions are fair and unbiased, but employees may think you have a hidden motive.

• Do something with the survey results. The importance of employee surveys is unmistakable, but if you're not going to act on the results the whole surveying exercise will be in vain. More importantly, if you don't close the feedback loop, employees won't take your next survey project seriously. When you do take action as a result of the survey report, let them know changes were made because of employee's feedback!

Is your employee survey software getting the job done? Having a survey program in place to collect employee feedback and measure employee satisfaction should be a no brainer for human resource departments. Unfortunately, a lot of departments haven't put a program in place yet, or worse, have never conducted an employee job satisfaction survey project.

You may be thinking to yourself, Why do we need to measure employee satisfaction? Our employees are generally happy. My response is, How do you know? I mean really, how can you know if your employees are actually satisfied and happy if you've never conducted a survey to ask them? No one is going to come to your office and tell you they hate working at your organization. Some HR professionals think they can measure employee satisfaction based on employee retention rates. Looking at employee retention rates isn't necessarily the best way to judge how happy your employees are. Employees who don't have high job satisfaction may stay at an organization because they're satisfied with something else, such as the work environment. Or in today's current economic environment, even the most dissatisfied employees will be reluctant to leave an organization because they think the job market looks bleak.

As you can imagine, there are many factors contributing to worker and staff satisfaction such as:


In past posts, I've recommended collecting survey responses using anonymous online employee survey questionnaires generated by an employee survey tool. By periodically conducting surveys organizations can measure employee satisfaction with management, the mission and vision, teamwork and corporate communication.

Don't forget if you use survey creation software to create employee satisfaction surveys, you should also create surveys to conduct exit interviews. After all, most of the time a satisfied employee is not going to leave an organization.

I spoke to a client recently who had made a great online survey for distributors of two distinct products – Widget A & Gadget B. The web survey had attractive graphics and insightful questions. However, there was an issue regarding how the survey function. More specifically, which survey respondents (read: different distributors) should see which questions. Survey questions #3-34 were for distributors of Widget A and survey questions #35-67 were intended for distributors of Gadget B. Seems easy enough, but there was a little catch: some survey respondents distribute both products and were therefore required to answer all questions.

It seemed simple enough at the outset, and the client understood what each type of survey question logic did. The second question asked the respondent whether they distributed Widget A only, Gadget B only or Both Widget A and Gadget B. Depending on how this question was answered, the survey respondent would be shuttled down the correct survey path using branch logic. Widget A only and Both Widget A and Gadget B went to survey question #3 and Gadget B only distributors went to survey question #35. However, at question 34 skip logic is used take survey respondents to the survey website's Thank You page. This was fine for Widget A only distributors, but a major headache for Both Widget A and Gadget B distributors.

This is where Cvent Web Survey's Client Services team can be a life saver for survey creators. I was there to help the survey writer create a survey that met their survey project needs.

The first option I thought of involved Advanced Logic. Once the initial branch logic was used, we simply use advanced survey question logic on the client's survey questions #35-67 to make sure anyone who responded Widget A only to the initial question (Q2) would not see these questions. This achieved the desired user experience but was tedious and time consuming. The client wanted to launch their surveys soon as possible so this was not the ideal solution in this case.

I then suggested a second option: make two separate questions with branch logic. The existing survey question (Q2) would be changed to Do you distribute A? and another survey question would be added before #35 that asked Do you distribute B? If a respondent selected Yes for Q2, they would see survey questions #3-35 and if they responded No, they would see the new survey question. If survey respondents answered Yes on the new survey question, they would see the remaining questions. The client was no on her way to a great survey with an excellent respondent experience. To top it off, it only took a minute!

Cvent offers a varied range of survey question logic, you just need to decide which will work best for your particular survey project. If you need help deciding which question type or logic type will work best for your survey, never hesitate to give our Client Services team a call.

After writing survey questions, creating an online survey using one of the many online survey software tools available (I recommend you try Cvent's survey system - of course!) and finally posting survey questions to the web, you need to get your survey sample in order. Posting the survey online can be an easy task with survey hosting software that does all the coding and back end work for you. But selecting your survey sample can sometimes be an added headache in the online survey questionnaire process.

Chances are you're going to look to email marketing to invite survey respondents, probably even using the email survey tool that's part of the system you've chosen. But how are you going to select the sample and get your consumer market research, credit union survey or any other type of questionnaire into their inboxes?

Hopefully when you were shopping for satisfaction survey software or a market research tool you made sure the system had a robust contact database you could segment based on various criteria to fit your survey needs. Using our tool, you can segment your database and easily send email survey invites to the resulting survey sample. There's no need to export contacts between systems to select the group of contacts for this survey.

Cvent's online data collection tool makes it easy to collect customer insights when conducting consumer surveys. Sign up for a product demonstration to learn more about how Cvent Web Surveys software can help with your next survey project.

People don't spend a lot of time talking about the importance of scales and how they're set up. But just like question flow and the wording of the question, the type of survey scale you select matters.

Today's online survey design guide tip is not to use numbers to label your scale. Instead, opt to use descriptions. Survey scales have been the subject of a lot of market research. These studies have found respondents prefer rating scales with verbal cues over numbered scales. It provides more reliability to the scale. But more importantly, using numeric values can confuse your online survey respondent. To avoid confusion and improve the validity of your survey data, I suggest avoiding numbered likert scales in your next online survey project. Take likert scale example questions:

I read a great post by Paul Dunay over at Marketing Prof's Daily Fix blog last week: Is Real Time Marketing in your future? Paul made a great point, a few years ago marketing was allowed some ramp up time for strategic shifts, today that's not the case. We've moved into the era of Real Time Marketing where we are expected to plan and react quickly - not in 45 days.

So where do survey questionnaires fit into this new age of marketing? I think it's clear paper surveys and paper survey software is not the way to go anymore. Paper surveys take entirely too long to send out, collect survey responses and do the required data entry before you can even begin to analyze survey responses. On the bright side, there is great online survey creation software to help you get a web survey project of the ground quickly. Online marketing survey software cuts down the time to create online survey questionniares with the right survey questions, send email invitations, collect feedback and analyze survey data.

But wait, creating business surveys isn't instant, neither is collecting responses or presenting survey findings. This is true, but your marketing team also can't fly blind when making instant decisions. Even though we need to react instantly, we also need to have the data on hand to make informed decisions.

Paul shares one of his boss' sayings with us, if you had a leak in your basement would you wait 45 days for a consultant to put on a webinar on How to fix your leaky basement? The answer is of course not, you're going to start getting quotes to fix the leak immediately. Same thing with marketing surveys, you need to collect data to be able to make decisions. I would recommend not waiting until you have a leak to begin collecting customer feedback or conducting client satisfaction surveys.

On Tuesday, the public opinion survey results were released by the Wenatchee research firm hired by East Wenatchee and Douglas County. The survey project's goal was to gauge community opinion concerning the development of the Apple Capital Recreation Loop Trail in East Wenatchee, Washington.

According to the survey findings that were released 55% of survey respondents opposed any development along the trail and 15% favored some development, including waterfront shops and restaurants. Unfortunately, the accuracy of the community attitude survey findings are being questioned. They think those who support some development may have been under represented in the survey sample.

The quantitative market research method used for data collection included both paper surveys and online surveys hosed on the More Than a Trail website. The website survey collected survey responses from respondents willing to identify themselves, it was not an anonymous survey. All parties involved in the survey project, according to The Wenatchee World article, agree even though the survey results are not significant there were a huge number of survey respondents. How many is a huge number of survey respondents? 1,249.

Here's how those involved view the survey: like a public hearing. You can only do so much to encourage participation, and 1,249 responses exceeds local government standards. With a public hearing, typically the decision makers only hear from the people who have objections the others don't show up, so they don't get heard. This survey allowed everyone a chance to "show up." The public opinion survey was well promoted with data collection techniques that included publicizing the quantitative research survey on local radio station, newspapers, association chapters, employee newsletters and signs were posted along the trial.

I really like that East Wenatchee is turning to online survey methods as well as paper questionnaires to get an understanding of public and community opinion for issues that will affect, well the community. Their analogy of an online survey being like a public hearing is a pretty good one. But I see where there could be concern about the overall results of their survey questionnaire. It does seem unlikely that 55% of any survey sample or population would be completely against anything - not have various degrees of how much development is too much.

My first reaction would be to look to the fact the website survey was not anonymous. While I understand it's hard to guard against "ballot stuffing" with a website survey online, the fact that it was not anonymous could have deterred people from responding. Why? Well, if they felt their opinion differed from the majority they may have declined to take the survey in case responses were traced back to them. On the same note, survey respondents may have felt social pressures to respond in a certain way. It's a tough call. When you're deciding on your quantitative methods to collect feedback, you need to weight the pros and cons of available survey methodologies and go with what you believe will result in the best, unbiased results.

Did you know there are 6 steps in the market research process?  While this process speaks directly to marketing research professionals, the process applies to HR, customer or education surveys as well:

1. Identify and define the problem.  Before you start any web survey project, you should identify the key issues you hope to be able to solve.  This step should also include clearly defined objectives.
    
2. Develop the approach. In this step, you need to establish a budget, understand influencing factors such as the environment or economy, decide on sampling and survey methods, and formulating hypotheses.
    
3. Research design. Designing a survey or questionnaire is considered the most important step in any survey process.  Question design takes a lot of thought and time.  We like to say, "If you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out."  This means that if the questions are bad, the data will be bad as well.  During the survey research design, keep in mind sampling methods and data analysis factors you intend to use.
    
4. Collect the data. Don't forget to test your survey before to ensure you're fielding the correct data.  Thankfully, with the help of an online survey tool, this step is relatively painless.
    
5. Analyze the Data. The types of analysis you planned to perform on the collected survey data should have been decided in earlier steps, but after collecting the data you have to actually perform the survey analysis.  Analysis can be performed using survey analysis tools like office programs, such as Excel, or more advanced programs such as SPSS - the complexity of the questions will determine this.
    
6. Report, Present, Take Action.  The final step in the market research process is to present your survey research findings and draw conclusions.  While Step 3 is the most important because it defines the outcome of your survey, if you fail to complete this last step and act on the findings in some way, the previous steps don't matter. 

As I mentioned in the beginning, this same process can be applied to any type of project: product evaluations, customer satisfaction questionnaires, public relation surveys, etc.  If you give each step the attention it deserves, each of your online surveys should be a success.