Survey Planning Process

Why are you conducting this survey? What are you hoping to learn or evaluate? It is best to consider how this survey will help inform your actions and decisions as well as any action steps/items that could be influenced by this survey going forward. 

Additionally, determine what type of survey this will be. Will this survey help you to evaluate the satisfaction of a service, product, or program? Will this survey seek to generate feedback about an upcoming change or policy? Will this survey serve as a platform for voting? This will especially be helpful for writing your questions.

What population do you plan to survey or what population will be affected by any actions that come out of this survey? How big of a population do you wish to survey? Try to nail down the specific population you wish to survey to optimize the results.

Before you move forward with creating the survey, schedule out the survey in advance to set deadlines and reminders. Then work backwards to determine the time frame for:

1. Finishing the survey preparation
2. Sending the initial survey email
3. Sending reminder emails to survey participants
4. Closing the survey
5. Collecting/analyzing results

When crafting the questions for your survey, focus on the purpose of the survey and developing topics to drive your questions. What are those key factors that fit under the umbrella of your survey's purpose? Take those factors and translate them into questions. If you are looking to gauge customer satisfaction, think through each area related to the customer experience to build your questions. 

After you have created your questions, invite others into the conversation as you go through a round of revising questions. Which questions will more efficiently invoke feedback relevant to the purpose of the survey? In many cases, less is more.

To view sample questions of previous survey instruments, click here.

When sending out your first email, give a clear and concise description of the survey, along with its closing date. If your survey is rather short, it is helpful to communicate an estimated amount of time that it will take to complete the survey. This will provide an incentive to complete the survey due to the low time commitment.

It is helpful to send another email to serve as a reminder that the survey is still open and will be closing soon. A good rule of thumb would be to send a reminder email approximately one to two weeks out from the closing date of the survey.

Once the survey is closed, please thank your population for completing the survey if you have not already done so. Review the results to see how sufficient the response rate was to gleaning substantive feedback for your survey, which varies based on the population size.

An analysis of the survey results will confirm or identify trends in the data, leading to the key takeaways that will inform follow-up action steps. In addition to providing the platform to conduct the survey, we also offer an analysis of the results, highlighting trends, themes, and consistencies.

At this point, the crucial question of the survey is: Where do we go from here? After hearing from your population, what action steps could and should be taken? Take the necessary time to comb through the survey analysis and written responses to consider where to go from here. 

Once action items have been determined, follow-up with communication to the surveyed population, then follow through with clear, well-defined action steps.

Looking for previous question that were used in surveys that we have administered? Below is a list of Survey Instruments that were used in previous surveys, which may assist you in the crafting of questions for your next survey.