As well as disseminating information, you may have the opposite requirement — to gather data from your
stakeholders, ie. employees, customers, salespeople, suppliers, members or subscribers. For example, you may wish to canvass
the attitudes of your employees; or to poll customers, members or subscribers with a satisfaction survey, or assess their
reaction to any proposed changes. What all these exercises potentially have in common is that you are asking people to
respond in a straightforward fashion. At its simplest, they might mark a simple scale, making the exercise easy both for
them to understand and undertake and for you to analyse and act upon. Data-gathering exercises can obviously get more
involved, including posing narrative questions, but the hallmark of the most effective exercises is their powerful yet
simple methodology.
One of our case studies describes in detail a particular project of this type, but it is irrefutable that this overall approach has a great many advantages over either paper-based exercises, or those that tend to be more involved or more narrative (and thus more subjective and more difficult to analyse):
- it is totally scalable ie. not sensitive to volume — once the questionnaire or survey is online it doesn’t
matter whether it is completed by 20 or 20,000 respondents
- there is no data collation effort — as each questionnaire is completed the response data is being written to a
database from which you could, if you wished, simply derive aggregate data ie. percentage or total responses
- the questionnaire or survey design is ‘soft’ — you need only specify how many points on the scale
(say 4-6) and this then acts as the template for the webpage, which unlike the printed page has no concept of length
- it is also scalable in terms of number of questions/statements (obviously within sensible limits — too few and you
won’t get much feedback, too many and you’ll turn people off with the perceived effort required to fill it in);
we simply upload these as a table which the questionnaire steps through
- and because there’s no artwork and no printing costs or delays, the body of questions can grow or shrink at the
concept or testing stage without penalty
- since it is online, respondents can complete your survey whenever and wherever it suits them
- surveys can be adapted to the needs of data subjects — this could be as simple as different sets of questions for
different types of respondent
- questionnaires can be easily personalised if respondents are having to log in (which they normally will be in a closed
user group)
- responses can be fed back to you individually (by e-mail), the response-to-date can be downloaded to you on demand, or we
can provide the total response to you as a spreadsheet at the end of the exercise (either when everyone has completed or
when you declare it closed)
- if you really wanted to keep it simple, you could view the aggregate response at any time as a graph
(bar, line or pie) with an accompanying table of results
Click here to see an (anonymised) example of a in-house employee survey we
have undertaken. NB this is a fairly complex example, but as noted above the design of our survey webpages is such that data-gathering exercises can grow quickly and easily, while remaining very simple to administer.
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