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Tell us what you need, relax, and leave it to the experts!
Most survey-based feedback projects can be broken down into five familiar stages - see the list below. Your experience and the resources available to you might mean you're comfortable with undertaking some of these, but your project could benefit enormously from letting experts in the other areas help you to deliver a truly worthwhile result.
The SurveyShack Managed Survey Services team can pick up your project entirely, or from any stage of the project that you may need them to.
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1. Setting Goals for your Feedback Project
- 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.
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2. Designing your Project
- 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.
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3. Setting-up and Testing
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.
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4. Going Live!
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
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5. Analysis and Reporting
Hopefully by now you already have a good idea of what output is required, and the steps required to produce this, but surveys often throw up interesting and surprising results. Analysing and understanding these can lead to those exciting 'lightbulb' moments and you need to be ready to explore these opportunities when they arise. Regardless of these however, you might require assistance with some of these common post-survey actions:
- Review and identify the 'headlines' - the main insight that can be acted upon - as defined by your project objectives
- Drill down into each headline to explore the data and be clear on the detail that has driven these outcomes
- Explore the 'context' of the insight stories that are coming out - read through the comments provided by respondents and cross-check/analyse related parts of the data to validate this insight
- Segment any key demographical parts of the sample - filter data to break the sample down into key groups and if necessary, repeat the breakdown analysis above
- Generate reports according to pre-designed 'templates if these have been created already, or build the report from scratch if not.
Contact us here to find out more about our Managed Survey Services options.
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Membership ‘Experience’ Survey - Managed Service
SurveyShack expert survey delivery team helps optimise and manage strategic membership survey.
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The Movement
When it comes to the Scouts, everyone’s welcome. All genders, races and backgrounds.
Every week they give almost half a million people aged 6-25 the skills they need for school, college, university, the job interview, the important speech, the tricky challenge and the big dreams: the skills they need for life. Scouts believe in helping young people take charge, speak up and play their part. They bring people together.
And research proves it’s really working too. Scouts are 17% more likely to show leadership skills, work well in teams and are a third more likely to support their communities.
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The Challenge
The annual Scout ‘experience’ survey had previously evolved through the consolidation of numerous other feedback projects and provides the organisation with vital insight into the impact the organisation has on membership communities.
Due to the creation of a new, dedicated ‘Insight’ team and the need to launch this strategic, global organisational feedback project in only a few weeks, the Scouts needed expert assistance with updating, optimising and testing a large, highly detailed legacy survey used in previous years.
Key to the success of the project was the essential need to be able to accurately compare the results with pervious such annual surveys using advanced data analysis formats (SPSS). This required liaison with the Scouts own 3rd party data analyst during the set-up phase.
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The Solution
The SurveyShack Managed Survey Services delivery team were engaged and had to quickly familiarise with the legacy survey that already existed in the Scouts SurveyGizmo user account - without the benefit of being able to consult with the original creator of the survey - then copy it and apply numerous optimisations before preparing for the launch.
The complex but critical branching had to be reverse-engineered to ensure it functioned perfectly, and reporting values added to each question and answer to provide for the essential data analysis that would be undertaken using the SPSS formatted data export. This required close liaison between the SurveyShack team and the 3rd party provider of the data analysis to ensure the data would have been coded accurately.
Other optimisations were applied to aid with respondent engagement, including:
- Visual enhancements in the form of a branding ‘theme’ and photographic images to help respondents to more easily navigate through the survey
- Ensuring the survey presented well when viewed on either a computer, tablet or smartphone
- Compliance with GDPR and all other relevant data protection and privacy requirements
“Throughout the intense set-up phase, the SurveyShack team went above and beyond in terms of focus and effort to ensure the survey had been accurately built, thoroughly tested and was able to be launched on time", according to Claire Morris, Insight manager at the Scouts.
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The Benefits
Not only was this highly detailed project successfully launched within a very short timeframe, the expected volume of responses was achieved, and the data analyst was able to very quickly engage with the results and reveal key areas of interest and trends.
“Feedback from participants in the survey confirmed that they enjoyed completing the updated format and due to the efficiency of the set-up, the live survey project management, and the reliability of the results, a high degree of faith in the insight the survey produced was achieved.”
Going forward, a well-designed and structured survey now provides for a much simpler and more straightforward redeployment year-on-year - where adjustments and enhancements which are very likely to be required can easily still be carried out.
The outcome from the project now allows the insight team to feed back to the Scouts stakeholders on the impact of the new organisational strategy. Not only does accurate validation of the strategy directly affect funding for the organisation, it clearly demonstrates how well they are ‘listening’ to the membership.
Contact us here to find out more about our Managed Survey Service options.