Best Survey Software Free

[Natalí Stibb]

Iwant to survey participants of a hackathon-type event before and after the event. Essentially I am trying to assess any changes in entrepreneurial mindset and intent, as a result of their experience. I want to ask the same set of 6 x likert questions before and after the hackathon.

My team typically sends two reminders as well, especially for surveys where we are trying to gauge overall metrics like rNPS. Receiving a larger sample size is important to us to ensure that we are reporting on fair scores.

I would suggest it depend on the requirement and type of audience. If its internal team 3 should be fine, if this is something that needs to be completed you can add more reminder may be every alternate day or every week until they respond. If this is external max to max 3 again based on need and who are the target people.

Through deeper analysis our team have done we were reduced ours to only 1; as over time response rates diminished the more invites that went out and the associated reminders. We also AB tested and found those that responded after multiple reminders were giving less detailed responses, so response quality is also something to consider. So just food for thought to consider with your program.

I used a Google form (*nerd alert I love a good color-coded spreadsheet), but you could just as easily send the list of questions in an email and make your own spreadsheet or keep the answers as a note in your phone.

KPW has since sent out a version* of this survey (*you can clearly substitute or adjust as needed for whoever you are sending this out to and what purpose you have for collecting the info) to his team at work in preparation for a staff retreat. A friend on IG said she sent it out to all the girls in her small group and it served as a great conversation starter at their next gathering. Our preschool does a version of this for all the teachers so the room parent has direction when buying birthday and Christmas gifts.

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My friend works for a company that just ran a survey on their entire client base to guide 2021 strategy. They spent money and precious credibility getting 800 responses from busy firms that heavily use their software. They needed detailed responses, so they added an open-ended question about how they could help their clients in the coming year.

In a recent B2B project, we captured an average of 45 seconds of audio content per question. With over 1,300 answers, we gathered over 16 hours of content that we auto-transcribed and coded (topic, sentiment, emotion, etc.) in minutes. Imagine taking a 3-minute highlight reel to the CEO with authentic customer voices, backed by quantitative support?

Does it make a difference? Yes! In a recent auto insurance survey we used these techniques as part of a recall-based Path To Purchase study with past 2 year shoppers, and we elicited incredibly detailed responses on how and why people made their decisions.

Included are suggestions on the design, data collection, and analysis of a quality survey. For more detailed information on important details to assess rigor of survey methology, see the AAPOR Transparency Initiative.

Surveys are an important research tool for learning about the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of groups of individuals. However, surveys may not always be the best tool for answering your research questions. They may be appropriate when there is not already sufficiently timely or relevant existing data on the topic of study. Researchers should consider the following questions when deciding whether to conduct a survey:

Once you have decided to conduct a survey, you will need to decide in what mode(s) to offer it. The most common modes are online, on the phone, in person, or by mail. The choice of mode will depend at least in part on the type of information in your survey frame and the quality of the contact information. Each mode has unique advantages and disadvantages, and the decision should balance the data quality needs of the research alongside practical considerations such as the budget and time requirements.

Some surveys use multiple modes, particularly if a subset of the people in the sample are more reachable via a different mode. Often, a less costly method is employed first or used concurrently with another method, for example offering a choice between online and telephone response, or mailing a paper survey with a telephone follow-up with those who have not yet responded.

One approach is to use multiple sampling frames; for example, in a phone survey, you can combine a sampling frame of people with cell phones and a sampling frame of people with landlines (or both), which is now considered a best practice for phone surveys.

To accurately measure whether an observed change between surveys taken at two points in time reflects a true shift in public attitudes or behaviors, it is critical to keep the question wording, framing, and methodology of the survey as similar as possible across the two surveys. Changes in question-wording and even the context of other questions before it can influence how respondents answer and make it appear that there has been a change in public opinion even if the only change is in how respondents are interpreting the question (or potentially mask an actual shift in opinion).

Changes in mode, such as comparing a survey conducted over the telephone to one conducted online, can sometimes also mimic a real change because many people respond to certain questions differently when speaking to an interviewer on the phone versus responding in private to a web survey. Questions that are very personal or have a response option that respondents see as socially undesirable, or embarrassing are particularly sensitive to this mode effect.

Interviewers need to undergo training that covers both recruiting respondents into the survey and administering the survey. Recruitment training should cover topics such as contacting sampled respondents and convincing reluctant respondents to participate. Interviewers should be comfortable navigating the hardware and software used to conduct the survey and pronouncing difficult names or terms. They should have familiarity with the concepts the survey questions are asking about and know how to help respondents without influencing their answers. Training should also involve practice interviews to familiarize the interviewers with the variety of situations they are likely to encounter. If the survey is being administered in languages other than English, interviewers should demonstrate language proficiency and cultural awareness. Training should address how to conduct non-English interviews appropriately.

Interviewers should be trained in protocols on how best to protect the health and well-being of themselves and respondents, as needed. As an example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, training in the proper use of personal protective equipment and social distancing would be appropriate for field staff.

Conducting a pilot test to ensure that all survey procedures (e.g., recruiting respondents, administering the survey, cleaning data) work as intended is recommended. If it is unclear what question-wording or survey design choice is best, implementing an experiment during data collection can help systematically compare the effects of two or more alternatives.

Checks must be made at every step of the survey life cycle to ensure that the sample is selected properly, the questionnaire is programmed accurately, interviewers do their work properly, information from questionnaires is edited and coded accurately, and proper analyses are used. The data should be monitored while it is being collected by using techniques such as observation of interviewers, replication of some interviews (re-interviews), and monitoring of response and paradata distributions. Odd patterns of responses may reflect a programming error or interviewer training issue that needs to be addressed immediately.

It is important to monitor responses and attempt to maximize the number of people who respond to your survey. If very few people respond to your survey, there is a risk that you may be missing some types of respondents entirely, and your survey estimates may be biased. There are a variety of ways to incentivize respondents to participate in your survey, including offering monetary or non-monetary incentives, contacting them multiple times in different ways and at different times of the day, and/or using different persuasive messages. Interviewers can also help convince reluctant respondents to participate. Ideally, reasonable efforts should be made to convince both respondents who have not acknowledged the survey requests as well as those who refused to participate.

Analyzing survey data is, in many ways, similar to data analysis in other fields. However, there are a few details unique to survey data analysis to take note of. It is important to be as transparent as possible, including about any statistical techniques used to adjust the data.

Ideally, the composition of your sample would match the population under study for all the characteristics that are relevant to the topic of your survey; characteristics such as age, sex, race/ethnicity, location, educational attainment, political party identification, etc. However, this is rarely the case in practice, which can lead to the results of your survey being skewed. Weighting is a statistical technique to adjust the results to adjust the relative contributions of your respondents to match the population characteristics more closely. Learn more about weighting.

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