Be sure to add a comment below about your own experience with incentives, and be entered to win some fresh Kona coffee!
In my last post (Increasing Response Rates: Part I), I talked about increasing your survey response rates. I suggested that you:

Tell your respondents you will share the results with them.
Identify allies who will urge [...]

The power of SurveyGizmo can make reaching out to your customers more accessible and even make the survey process easier for your customer. So what could possibly be wrong with sending a customer satisfaction survey? . . . Plenty!
We’ve all participated in customer satisfaction surveys. Some may have been okay, most probably not. It [...]

An advantage of online surveys is that respondents frequently offer more and longer comments than they do on paper-and-pencil surveys. And comments are where we may find our most significant sales opportunities or our most useful program improvement ideas.
But analyzing comments can intimidate us. We think that to analyze comments we have to read all [...]

“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. [...]

So you’ve completed your survey and now you wonder what you can learn from your data.
That’s easy, isn’t it? Three months ago, your survey began with a set of questions. Now you’ve got your data. Look up the answers!! Oh – and don’t forget the PowerPoint slides. Make them pretty.
But there must be more to [...]

Election season is the time for lots of polls, which makes it a good time to highlight what they can teach us about our surveys! Basically a poll is just a type of survey and so the principles that make polling powerful apply to surveys.
Can the results of polls be trusted? I just read an [...]

As you may have noticed, we have added Bill Johnston to our survey expert team. Right now he is compiling a list of topics he wants to cover in the coming months and would really appreciate your input. Please fill out the following survey so we can make sure to address the topics that [...]

A type of survey in which there is much interest this month is the political poll. Questions I hear a lot are, “Can the polls be trusted?” and “How can they get away with polling so few people?”
We can increase our understanding of polls by answering two questions:

How can polls be accurate with such seemingly [...]

It’s been awhile and 2008 has been a busy year. It has also been a year where people have been looking to get more out of their surveys. I have had a steady stream of people coming to me with questions like:

I have all this data, but I’m not sure what it is telling me?
How [...]

A question I have been asked from time-to-time is, “How many choices should I give respondents when I’m asking them how much they agree or disagree with something?” As in . . .

Which is correct? Does it matter?
Yes, it matters.
Use an odd-numbered scale and, if you expect your results to be fully distributed from the [...]

Surveys can be fun! Newspapers, TV programs, radio shows and the like love to quote survey results because audiences find them entertaining. We enjoy learning other people’s personal habits or political views and seeing where we fit in. (Check out SurveyGizmo’s ipoll application (ipoll.surveygizmo.com) for some fun examples.)
But surveys are also a critical component of [...]

Very few people create surveys out of boredom or simply for fun. Those few that do (such as myself) should seek professional help (I recommend my therapist).
No, when we create surveys, it is for a specific reason — to gain knowledge about a topic or issue so that we can make important decisions, publish [...]

The Pareto principle (which you may know as the 80-20 rule) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.”
The Pareto principle also applies to survey research. When planning your [...]

At Survey Design and Analysis I am the resident survey expert and statistician. Okay I admit it, “I am a statistician..” Statistics is a big part of Market Research but I’m not sure that is well understood.
What exactly is a statistician and why is it important in Market Research? Quality Improvement guru, Bill Sherkenbach [...]

Why do people do surveys?
I don’t like the use of extrinsic incentives (bribes) for doing surveys. Wrong motivation, wrong expectations, wrong outcome!
Experiment in the Woods
I recently hired a dozen workers. I divided them at random into two groups of six. I took them out to the woods and took group A to a clearing with [...]

We’re happy to welcome survey expert Ed Halteman to the SurveyGizmo family. Ed took his first course on survey design in 1978 and has designed and analyzed more than 250 surveys in the past 10 years. Ed, who has a master’s degree in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in statistics, currently heads Survey Design [...]