Surveying your community can be a powerful way to understand the needs, interests, and opinions of your target audience. It can also help you build trust and engage with your community members. While surveys have many limitations they can help your organization gain helpful insights and data for future action.
Best practices for creating effective surveys:
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Understand your target audience
- Having a clear understanding of the people that you are contacting is crucial, and should impact how you build your survey. What questions should be asked of these people? What language should be used? How might they respond to certain words/phrases/questions?
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Define a clear goal for the survey
- This should be an attainable and specific goal, and will help you prioritize which questions to ask.
- Example: I want to know what key factors cause families to leave our school.
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Keep more personal questions to the end
- Keep your early set of questions light and straightforward, and move towards more personal questions (typically any demographic questions like age, race, address, etc.) once trust has been established.
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Keep your survey short
- Respondents will be much more likely to complete your survey if it is concise and to the point. Scripts should be about 3-5 questions so the conversations are short and efficient.
- Questions that are most important to accomplishing the goal of your survey should come earlier in the question order, so that if there is drop off or question fatigue you can still gather important data.
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Ask mostly close-ended questions
- Close-ended questions are questions that use pre-populated answer choices, like yes or no questions. These questions are easier for people to answer and will provide you with clear data that your organization can evaluate. When writing multiple choice questions, it is good practice to include an answer like “I don’t know” or “Other” to encompass unexpected results. Open-ended responses take much longer to answer and are harder to analyze, so if you must collect any feedback in the respondents own words, limit these types of questions to 1-2 at the end of your survey.
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Do not ask leading questions
- Try not to put your own opinion into the question prompt or phrase a question in a way that will influence a respondent’s answer. Doing so can influence the responses in a way that does not reflect the respondents’ true experiences.
- Example: Should the mayor be recalled for their corrupt campaign practices?
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Keep answer choices balanced and consistent
- Answer choices that ask respondents for opinions or ranking should be clear, balanced, and consistent throughout the survey so that respondents are not confused or influenced in one direction or another.
- Example of unbalanced answer choices: How likely are you to vote in favor of recalling the mayor
- Very likely
- Somewhat likely
- Not likely
- Example of balanced answer choices: How likely are you to vote in favor of recalling the mayor
- Very likely
- Somewhat likely
- Neutral/Undecided
- Somewhat unlikely
- Very unlikely
Organizer tip: Use Scripts tool to create a landing page to collect responses or phone bank script for your survey. If doing a phone survey, you can launch a phone bank and collect responses via a script. If doing an online survey, you can use the email tool and build a landing page to share your survey with your community. See the Help Center Articles on Creating a Script or Deploying and Managing a Script for more information.
Resources
View the Organizing and Advocacy Playbook as a PDF
Background Information
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Learning
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Planning
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Implementation
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Execution
Advocacy Action Plan Phase-Reflection