What are your survey goals?
This week, I’m bringing you another quick and simple tip to improve your surveys.
Next time you sit down to craft a survey, ask yourself: What are my goals?
One of the most important steps in designing a good survey is to write out your survey goals. Seriously, I want you to have a list of your survey goals before you do anything else survey-related.
Your goals should answer questions like: Why are you creating this survey? What do you want to learn? How will you use this information?
In my years of survey design, I've typically found that goals fall into one of the following 4 categories:
Basic Info—collecting demographics (characteristics of people like age, race, ethnicity, gender, education, income, etc.), prior experience, contact information, and other details from people to better understand individuals or a group.
Feedback—asking people to share their opinion on a product, a service, an event, or something else to learn what you are doing well and how you might improve.
Describe—asking questions to better understand how people experience or have experienced the world around them, or to have them self-reflect or self-assess.
Impact—asking questions to measure change or evaluate the difference your work, an initiative, a product, etc. may have made.
I find it helpful to use the broader categories listed above and create a short and sweet list to guide my survey design process. Here's a quick example of the goals for the onboarding survey I use for my company
Collect background information on clients (name, pronunciation, best contact information). (Basic Info)
Understand what goal(s) my clients have for our work together—what do they hope to learn, accomplish, etc.? (Basic Info)
Assess people’s knowledge of survey design. (Describe)
Measure people’s confidence in survey design. (Impact)
If you've already created a survey, you can still use goals to guide your process. Put the survey draft away and list out your goals. Then review the survey draft with your goals in mind: Are there questions you need to remove because they don't fit with your goals? Are there questions you need to add?
The goals you define for your survey should guide every single part of your survey design process (and they will make survey design so much easier!). Without clear goals, surveys can get long, chaotic, and honestly—miss the point!
Keep your goals front and center, and watch how much easier the survey process becomes.
