The least you can do to improve a survey

Let’s be honest, we often get asked to improve a survey when we don’t have time to read an entire survey book.

So here are some downloadable resources to get you started quickly. You’ll find more about them in Chapter 8, “The least you can do”, in my book on surveys.

Get a checklist for the seven steps in my survey process

Here’s an editable checklist for all of the seven steps in the survey process (.docx)

It takes you through these steps:

  1. Goals: Establish the goals for your survey
  2. Sample: Decide who to ask and how many
  3. Questions: Test the questions
  4. Questionnaire: Build the questionnaire
  5. Fieldwork: Run the survey from invitation to follow-up
  6. Responses: Clean and analyse the data
  7. Reports: Present the results.
The seven steps of the survey process are: Goals: Establish your goals for the survey, leading to questions you need answers to Sample: Check who to ask and how many, leading to people you will invite to answer Questions: Test the questions, leading to questions people can answer Questionnaire: Build the questionnaire, leading to questions people can interact with Fieldwork: Run the survey from invitation to follow-up, leading to people who respond Responses: Clean and analyze the data, leading to answers Reports: Present the results, leading to decisions.
The survey process in seven steps

It’s possible to do a survey in a day

Seven steps in process can sound like “this will take forever”. But it’s possible to do a survey, from goals to reports, in a single day.

You’ll need to focus and to be ruthless:

  • Choose one Most Crucial Question, the one that makes a difference and will provide essential data for decision making.
  • Add no more than a couple of extra questions to help you decide whether the people who answer are representative of the defined group of people you want to answer
  • Keep your sample really small. Do a pilot with no more than 10 people and survey no more than 100.

Here we go:

Get a timetable for doing a survey in a week

More realistically, I think many surveys can be done in a week. It’s brisk but it’s definitely possible.

My downloadable and editable timetable has all the activities within a single week, but of course you can choose to spread the activities out – perhaps over three weeks elapsed time.

These resources are free

These resources are free for you to use and share, under a Creative Commons license which asks you to credit me and say where you got them from.

If you find them valuable, please consider: