Ed Halteman: A Sampling Attitude

“Attitude is everything” has significance for more than just football or other sports! Cultivating a sampling attitude can help you “win” improvements to your survey process.

We have already seen the power of sampling in predicting election results in my prior post on election sampling and intuition tells us that sampling should save time and money. However, having a sampling attitude goes beyond this. A sampling attitude stems from customer focus and leads to better decision-making, improved relationships with customers, employees and/or prospects, and savings in time and money. Why not get the biggest bang from your survey dollar?

A sampling attitude starts with keeping two questions at the forefront:

1. How can I perform my survey in the most efficient manner possible?
2. How can I make my survey as respondent-friendly as possible (so that my survey respondents can provide good information without being inconvenienced)?

Clearly, if we can get the same information from 300 responses to our survey as from 2000 responses then it would be much more efficient to aim for obtaining the 300 responses. However, not only do YOU save time and money going to a smaller sample, but think of all the “respondent time” that has been saved. Customers, especially, appreciate suppliers that show concern for their time!

If we can be more efficient with sample size, let’s keep the attitude going. We can be more efficient in the way we word questions – creating questions that are clear and easy to understand. We can be more efficient in the number of questions we include – including only questions that are absolutely necessary for making our decisions, leaving nice-to-know questions out.

So how do we do all this? Change your attitude and follow these general guidelines:

• Aim for receiving between 150 and 300 responses to your survey.
• Test and re-test your questions for clarity and understanding.
• Spend time to make your survey objectives clear, and then test each of your questions against the objectives to make sure they will add to meeting that objective.

For 2009 improve your attitude and improve your survey process at the same time.

Happy New Year!

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