Pat’s Point of View

Here’s a Friday afternoon thought regarding a classic mistake in trying to get people to participate in a survey. When you tell people about your survey, make sure they can complete it!

Sounds simple, right? Well that’s because it is.

Some background perhaps. A common sight within organisations is the satisfaction survey, your HR department might call it something else but essentially they’re all the same. And like all satisfaction surveys—think of a motel or car rental company—it’s really a poor attempt at communicating with your audience, or giving the perception that you are communicating with them (but I digress). People know this, that you’re not really listening to them (the vague, clichéd questions are a dead giveaway) so you’re already off to a bad start if you choose to run such a survey. But you’re really going to struggle when you ask staff to complete a survey that doesn’t exist…yet.

I saw an example of this today, where an email—and a rather long winded email full of ‘management speak’—was sent to all staff in a large organisation, telling them about the flagship staff engagement activity for the year, an all-encompassing survey (!!). At the end there was a link to the online survey. At this point I was simply surprised it was an online survey and out of sheer excitment decided to click on the link. Error. Not a nice “survey not open please come back later” message, an HTTP 404 error.

Apparently I was meant to wait until the survey opened in a few days time and then go back to the email, click the link and complete the survey. Hmmm. Delete!

Survey completion rates are typically quite low. Without a tangible incentive they’re even lower. If it has anything to do with work, waaaay low. So you’ve got very little chance of getting a decent set of responses, but when the link doesn’t work at the point when people are the most likely to click on it, you’ve lost before you’re even begun.

Let’s not even discuss whether a survey is a good method for engaging with staff, the moral of the story is if you create a call to action make sure the people who you want to act are able to take action. This goes for surveys but also competitions, sales promotions and website launches.

(You may be thinking this post is rather ironic given my own recent attempts at surveying, but this is one mistake I definitely didn’t make :)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Usability. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment, find out more about me or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

You can also trackback from your own site or follow any comments made on this post through the RSS 2.0 feed.