5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Creating a Survey
Surveys provide insights that fuel your decisions and facilitate informed action. It’s like having a window into the mind of your audience! They can help a community decide how its residents feel about a particular project, or a small business understand what direction to go with a new product. When done correctly, surveys can provide real-world insight to help find answers to important decisions.
However, the effectiveness of your survey data relies heavily on the survey method you choose. With the variety of options available, navigating the maze of methodology, types of questions and survey type can seem overwhelming. So, how do you determine the right survey method that aligns with the kind of data you need?
Let’s dive into five crucial factors to consider to ensure that your survey method aligns perfectly with your objectives and yields actionable insights.
1. What are your objectives?
You would never start a journey without a destination in mind - and the same applies to your survey! Understanding your objective and what you want to achieve should be the North Star for building your survey.
What audience are you trying to tap into for insights and data? What questions matter the most to you? What data will you need to take the appropriate next steps?
Once you have clarity in purpose and define your goals it’s much easier to set out on your survey journey. Think of it like a destination on a roadmap. Once you have the destination in mind you can start to tailor your content, identify questions, and measure success once the survey is complete.
Which brings us to our next point!
2. Who is your target audience?
Identifying your target audience and getting the survey in front of them is one of the most crucial parts of building any survey. After all, you wouldn’t ask a bunch of baseball fans what their opinion is on a new soccer ball, would you? Audience matters because their insights and opinions will shape the direction of your future decisions.
For example, if you want community feedback on an upcoming project, then your target audience is easy! Find a cross section of the community you want to gain feedback from. One way to do this is with a Tallymade survey installation. By placing the survey installation in a high traffic area in the community, like community center, library, or busy intersection, you can collect feedback from various members of the community of all backgrounds and personas.
If it’s product research you want to conduct, then take a look at your existing customer base! If you already have email data , then you can send a digital survey with questions related to products they want to see, features they want, and more.
A Tallymade digital survey can help with this!
3. What budget do you have?
The budget and time you have to dedicate to a survey is an important consideration. Designing and distributing a survey can be as expensive or budget friendly as you want; it all depends on the size of the audience you want to reach or the resources you want to dedicate to designing your survey.
Don’t worry, there are free survey resources online. For example, Google Forms is a low-budget option to survey an audience, while others, like Gartner or Nielson, can cost a pretty penny. However, there are downsides to both. Free versions oftentimes offer limited design capabilities and branding (i.e. boring). Expensive survey companies like the two mentioned above are, well, expensive.
Fortunately, Tallymade offers a free survey for your first time! So you can respect your budget, while also seeing the results of a fun and engaging survey format.
4. What timeline do you have?
Budget and timeline oftentimes go hand in hand. After all, the longer you want a survey to run, the more resources (i.e. money) you will need to allocate towards it. Similarly, the timeline for when you need the data will have an impact on how you approach your survey.
For example, if you are looking for quick answers, a digital survey is probably your best bet. You can distribute the survey quickly and at scale, and the data will be accessible almost instantly. A couple issues you may run into with a quick survey is that you limit the opportunity for feedback and digital surveys have a short shelf life and are easily lost in an email inbox.
If you have the flexibility for a longer timeline and your audience is in a specific location, then a survey installation is a great option. It can live where you want and collect data over a long period of time.
5. How will you analyze the data?
Fortunately, most survey platforms come with an analytics component to help you sift through the data and breakdown results. However, simply tallying the votes is one thing, but interpreting the data into actionable insight is another. That’s because how you choose to frame the questions and the survey approach can influence the ease and depth of the data analytics.
For example, simple yes or no questions are easy to interpret, but what about open-ended questions? We call this quantitative (close ended) and qualitative (open-ended) questions. The latter is more difficult to analyze and interpret, so having the capabilities to do so is important to consider before designing your survey.
One way Tallymade analyzes qualitative data is through heat maps. Our “Design Your Own Park” survey displays patterns for where respondents placed items that they would like to see in a park near them. Using the heat maps, you can gain insight into areas and items respondents most want to see.
Tallymade makes survey design easy (and fun)
Crafting a successful survey is an art that combines strategy, insight, and execution. As you delve into the process of building your survey, remember that asking yourself the right questions beforehand are the building blocks of meaningful insights.
Tallymade can help you get started! We’ll work with you to design a survey that is fun, engaging, and unique so that you get the right data to make the right decisions. Whether it’s a digital survey or a survey installation, drop us a line and let’s see what we can do together.