Have you overlooked your best resource for creating a great survey?

A good survey should drive business decisions.

You want your survey to provide direction for planning, decision making, and allocation of resources. You want to know what drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, employee morale, organizational effectiveness, or association growth and renewal.

The problem is that respondents may not be able to tell you directly what drives their choices. If you ask the right questions, your analysis can uncover the hidden relationships that point toward high-leverage actions for future success.

So how do you come up with the "right" questions?

You have a few options for developing high-impact questions for your survey. For example, you could:

• Set up a committee to brainstorm issues and create questions from those issues.
• Poll all the managers involved and ask them what questions you should ask.
• Review surveys other organizations have used, and pick the questions that seem most relevant to your needs.

Ask for input from a selected group of the people you plan to survey - customers, members, employees

We favor including the fourth option, regardless of what else you do.

Why ask future respondents questions before you send them the survey?

Poorly designed or standardized "off-the-shelf" surveys -or regular annual surveys that are not updated - can miss early warning signs of trouble. For example, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review reports that:

"In 1997,... UPS was hit by a costly strike just 10 months after receiving impressive marks on its regular annual survey on worker morale... [the survey] had failed to uncover bitter complaints about the proliferation of part-time jobs within the company, a central issue in the strike."*

Your survey should ask the questions your respondents are in the best position to answer. Many surveys fail to provide full value because they overlook the insights and real concerns of your constitutents. Instead, they are internally focused. They are driven by management's concerns, or based on "accepted wisdom" that may need to be challenged. Asking only "insider-focused" questions leaves respondents wondering why they should continue.

Surveys that fail to address respondents' concerns will fail to spark interest in participating or hearing about the results. A good analysis will tell you what is important to those who responded. If your questionnaire does not include the really important issues, the analysis is hamstrung before the first response is received.

What about comments? If you overlook key content areas, respondents may write in comments. Comments can be extremely valuable. The bad news is, someone needs to sort through those comments. The closer your survey content is to the concerns of respondents, the fewer and more unique the comments you will receive.

How can we discover the key issues before we prepare the questions?

Interviewing a cross-section of customers or employees before you design your survey increases the likelihood that you will discover what's on people's minds.

Talk to the right people. Before you begin the survey, we recommend that you contact 10 or 12 key players. Talk to them by telephone, in person, or in focus groups. If time and resources are limited, you can always send them an email message with a few open-ended questions.

• For a customer survey, include at least some of your best customers, as well as those with whom you want to develop a more strategic relationship. If possible, also interview recently "lost" customers.
• For association membership or event surveys, ask old and new members, drop-outs, members who attend events and those who do not, members who volunteer and those who do not. If possible, talk with influential people who should be in the organization but are not.
• For employee surveys, ask influential employees - the ones people listen to - and people everyone talks to, regardless of their position in the organization. Depending on the size of your organization, you may need to select a representative group of employees from different business units, demographic groups, regions, and levels in the hierarchy.

Ask open-ended questions, then listen receptively. Ask sincere, open-ended questions to understand this elite group's needs and expectations. Instead of asking "what do you like, and what don't you like" about your organization, ask about:

• the policies and service characteristics that attract customers to you or drive them away
• the conditions and practices that motivate employees to give their best effort to your organization - and what tempts them to leave at the next opportunity
• the services and offerings that attract new members to your association and keep them coming to your events - and what might cause them to disengage

Choose your best internal facilitator(s) to do these interviews, or invite an independent third party such as Gainen Surveys to assist you. If you have done surveys before, be sure to review and build on what has been done in the past to foster continuity.

Talking to your target survey group is a supplement to getting help from insiders - not a substitute!

Managers clearly have issues they want to address. Frontline staff in your organization are the experts on what goes on in day-to-day interactions. Sometimes it's harder to listen to what they have to say. Again, your best facilitators, people who can listen non-defensively and summarize information accurately, will almost always yield surprising and significant insights.

Involving future respondents in the design of your survey increases your chances of learning what really matters to your constituents as well as to your organization's management. The result is better information for planning and decision-making.

Design your surveys with the analysis in mind.

Finally, be sure to design your survey so that the analysis will reveal which survey categories and items have the greatest impact on satisfaction and loyalty.

Call us toll-free, 877-666-2486, to discuss how we deliver results that matter for your business objectives. Or complete our contact information form to let us know how we can reach you.