Managed Survey Services

• What do you need to find out? Be clear about the core requirement of the project and focus always on the need-to-haves vs the nice-to-haves. Our design consultants can help coach you and your stakeholders on keeping it simple and focussed, and alert you to project specification drift where it starts to become evident.

• How many responses do you 'actually' need? Sometimes our clients are surprised to learn how few responses are required to achieve a statistical representation of their target population. After consulting with you to clearly understand your target audience and the methodology your project is most likely to follow, we use some handy tools to help advise on an actual sample size.

• What is your budget? Survey-based feedback projects can very quickly and easily scale in cost so be realistic and clear on what the true value of the insight you require is worth, then budget according to this.

• Methodology

- Who is the target audience? Do you have your own list of invitees or do you need a panel of respondents to sample from, or both?

- What combination of online vs hand-written responses might you need and how quickly do you need the results? Bear in mind that unlike online surveys,  hand-written surveys take more time to process before a report can be arrived at due to the printing time, posting of blank forms and data entry requirements. They are however still a very effective means of obtaining feedback in many applications.

- Could an incentive be appropriate and helpful in achieving the sample size target you require?

• Report

Who does your report need to cater for? A busy board is only going to want to see executive summaries whereas the marketing strategists will need to see a lot more detail.

Starting with a clear visualisation of what the end result needs to be able to communicate and look like makes designing the survey itself so much easier. We can suggest questions and question formats that will yield data in a format that is efficient to analyse and convert into the type of output you require. 

• Questionnaire

Online vs hard-copy questionnaires can often work in different ways when being responded to. Online respondents can be automatically 'skipped' to questions whereas a hard copy respondent will need clear written instructions on where to go next. All this requires more formatting and design to ensure the same required data is yielded.

The process of entering data from hardcopies needs to be considered also. A lot of 'comments' in a hardcopy questionnaire can add considerably to the data entry cost. We can advise on what is essential vs nice-to-have

What branding do you need? This can be an important consideration if you are carrying out sensitive market testing, or if you are contracting to a 3rd party client and it is their branding that is required. Our team are experienced in applying branding themes, logos and engaging images in ways that don't impact on the load-times of online surveys, and which are appealing on printed questionnaire forms also if these are required.

Now things start to get exciting - the project begins to come to life. This is the last chance though to make sure you've got it all right!

• Set-up and Testing Online Questionnaires.  These need careful and rigorous checking. If anything can possibly go wrong once it is live, it most definitely will. Every possible response scenario needs to be tried to ensure branching works correctly, and making sure it is compatible with all types of browser and mobile device is essential also.

• Set-up and Testing Paper Questionnaires. Proofing and testing hardcopy questionnaires is a slower process as it requires both completing by testers, then loading the data subsequently to ensure the data entry process has been set up correctly.

• Checking the Data Output. This needs to show that this is compatible with the reporting process, but generating dummy data can be time consuming. Why not let our team use specialist tools to do this for you.

• Preparing the email communications. Setting up and checking the email invitations and reminders is always required and more importantly, making sure these are delivered through email server SPAM filters and network firewalls is vital in these times of heightened online security awareness.

• Checking email lists. This is an area of risk to online survey feedback projects that needs ot be checked for and avoided. A badly maintained email list can risk online blacklisting, which is extremely difficult to recover from. Our team have tools they can use to run tests to check the content and quality of your list, and advise on what may need to be adjusted before undertaking a deployment.

Depending on the complexity of your project now that it's ready to go live, you may need to undertake some or all of the following:

• Deploy the email invitations

• Post/courier the blank paper forms and arrange for the return of these also

• Report to project stakeholders on the response rates, early trends etc.

• Deploy reminders, and possibly also undertake phone follow-up

• Agree on the close date, close and then carry out data checks

• Re-open to top-up on responses from critical target respondents if required