How to Design an Effective Survey

What Is an Effective Survey?

A well-executed survey can provide several benefits for your company. It can generate thought leadership for your company or provide media buzz about a specific product. When conducted by a third party, it lends an authoritative voice to the results, showing the advantages your products offer. But the survey has to be effective in order for you to see any benefit.

An effective survey has two main qualities. First, it must be newsworthy. The media will not show interest in a stale or boring topic. For example, the transition from CRT to LCD monitors is a topic that is years out of date. The second vital quality for a survey is that it must lead to a conversation that will be beneficial for your company. If you produce security software, a survey that reports on consumers’ eating habits may be interesting, but it will do nothing for your company.

Preparing the Survey

To design your survey, first consider the conversation you would like to engage in with the media. For example, Connect^sm had a client which wanted to promote a product that monitors application traffic, to help IT staff reduce website downtime. IT professionals seemed unconvinced of the product’s usefulness, believing that in the event that a company’s website was down, a customer would simply return later to purchase the product. When a survey of consumers revealed that in fact customers simply purchased from a competitor rather than wait for a functional website, this provided a much more newsworthy talking point, which improved exposure for the monitoring solution.

Once you select a topic, create a plan for the survey, including the process and your hypothesis regarding the results. Then, before creating the questions, outline the general question groups. This will help ensure that the survey covers all the relevant points. Having an excess of questions is preferable to realizing there was an important question you should have asked but didn’t.

Selecting the Questions

There are several question formats you should take advantage of when preparing the survey.

• A simple yes/no format is ideal for questions such as basic information about the respondents and their organizations.
• Multiple-choice questions will likely form the majority of a survey. Allowing respondents to choose from a list instead of creating open-ended responses makes the data easier to analyze, and it keeps them on topic.
• Ratings questions include a scale to rank options presented. For example, the question might ask IT professionals to rank in order of importance five issues they will need to budget for during the coming year.

As you consider the format of your questions, you will want to get the most information out of the fewest questions, without being overly complex. For example, this question is not as effective as it could be:

Q. Do you currently use server virtualization in your data center?

If the answer is “no,” further questions are necessary to find out if the respondent’s company has plans to implement virtualization in the future. A more effective question might be:

Q. Please select your firm’s current involvement in server virtualization.

• Don’t use and have no plans to use
• Discussing
• Currently in trials
• Implementing
• Already using

Once the survey is designed, testing it on a few people will give you a sense of whether the questions are worded correctly. Unexpected responses can help you make any needed corrections before the full-scale survey is conducted.

With correct design and preparation, conducting a survey can provide you with valuable insight about your industry and clients, and it can help you promote your company and products. It also allows you to interact more directly with clients and influential figures in your industry, helping you to establish your thought leadership and improve market positioning.