One of the most challenging obstacles for survey project leaders is getting participants to offer answers that are accurate and sincere. Sometimes, people lie on questionnaires. They may do so to spare your feelings (in the case of a personal interview), because of a natural proclivity to emphasize positive aspects, or to avoid a deeper level of involvement. In some cases, many of your respondents won't even realize they're doing it. So, how do you design a questionnaire that encourages a sincere dialogue with your population?

Today, we're going to explore creating an online survey that actually motivates your participants to share their thoughts freely and provide accurate information. I'll provide an overview of the process, including the tools and deployment strategy that encourages an active response.

Goals First

For any survey to be effective, it must be driven by one or more clearly-defined objectives. What do you hope to accomplish? Are you considering a new product and want to measure your existing customer base's potential response to it? Do you want to improve employee retention by measuring their level of satisfaction in their jobs? Does your support staff need additional training and you want to know which areas deserve priority? Before you create your web-based questionnaire, invest the time to identify your goals for the project.

Resources For Design

There are several approaches to designing your survey. For example, you might choose to partner with a design firm who has experience with similar projects. Or, you may decide to use an online service that can build your survey from established templates. An alternative approach is to select an internal team within your organization. The route you choose will be based upon your budget, available personnel, scope of the project, and experience.

Your primary focus - aside from collecting accurate data - should be encouraging response from your participant pool. If you're creating your first questionnaire, consider hiring an outside design agency (if your budget allows) or an online service. Not only will doing so make the process easier, but they're experienced in creating questions that motivate participation. Plus, you'll be able to use their professional design as the foundation for future surveys.

Resources For Execution

If you're using an online service to design the questions (even through the use of templates), they'll probably be able to deploy your survey for you, as well. A lot of services can send out email invitations to your participants with a link which directs them to your questionnaire. The responses are collected automatically with the data seamlessly exported to their servers. The more robust vendors offer a range of reports based upon the data collected. If you use an online vendor, make certain that they're backing up the data and that you can easily download it.

Last Thoughts

The key to deploying a web-based survey is to make the experience as easy as possible for your participants. In other words, while having access to exportable data, reports on demand, and template designs is useful, those factors do not influence participation. Instead, focus on sending email invitations that not only provide a link to your questionnaire, but also clearly tell recipients what to do. And if you're going to use templates, make sure you can modify the questions (context and phrasing) in order to better suit your objectives.

Finally, test your online survey before you actually deploy it to your entire audience. There are 2 reasons for doing so. First, by choosing a small, initial sample audience, you'll be able to test whether your questions properly motivate response. Second, web-based vendors are not infallible (neither are servers). The last thing you want to do is invest valuable time and resources into designing your questionnaire only to discover that there's a hiccup in the process during full deployment.

Define your goals, work with an experienced design firm or online vendor, and test the entire process before execution.