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With almost 20 years in the industry, primarily as a buyer, but now as the head of Supply for PureSpectrum, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to ensure that surveys are attracting and engaging real respondents effectively. Having managed large teams of programmers, project managers, and data processing on the client side, I am acutely aware of the pain points throughout a project’s life cycle that can result from poor survey design, programming errors, mismanagement in field, and ultimately having bad respondents complete surveys.

In my current role, I get to work directly with the companies who source the actual respondents. For any end client who has felt like they can’t get a straight answer on where respondents really come from, I can tell you that it has been very satisfying to share a client’s perspective directly with the people who interact with respondents and to learn from these companies what really moves the needle in getting real respondents to take surveys and provide thoughtful responses.
With this in mind, here are three things you can do to make your survey more attractive to real respondents.

1.  Shorter Surveys = Better Data

You want your survey to be under 10 minutes. Researchers who do several surveys of 2 minutes typically get back better results than doing one much longer survey. Breaking up surveys in this way can achieve a budgeted CPI and get better data. Yes, you don’t have the same respondents answering all of the same questions; however, the data you receive back is higher quality than the longer surveys since respondent fatigue has been removed. What we hear from suppliers is that many respondents are logging onto an app where they can filter surveys by LOI and they often prefer and start with the short surveys. What’s short? Under five minutes. We have seen that our top quality suppliers live in that “under 5 minute” space; and for good reason. They get us the best quality respondents because real respondents love short surveys. Shorter surveys = better data.

2.  Arrange to Engage

Make surveys engaging. Arrange your questions in a format that keeps people interested. The word “gamify” has surely been overused but it’s worth a mention. Gamify your surveys. Keep your lists short. Long lists are respondent killers. People are taking time in their day to participate in your research; make it easy for them to give you good data, not cumbersome and tedious. The harder they have to work to answer a question, the less likely they are to give you a good response. Make your surveys more engaging and you will see an increase in the quality and consistency of your data.

3.  Target Well and Don’t Ask Questions Twice

Pass in demographics and approved screening questions to your survey without asking them again. Suppliers already have most of the demographics you are looking for, so passing these in directly from the supplier will have several important benefits. One, it will reduce your LOI because it removes questions. Two, it reduces the tedious repetition and annoyance of having to answer age and gender multiple times (respondents have already gone through this exercise when signing up to take surveys). Three, it betters the overall experience for the respondent. The respondent goes straight from the supplier to the questionnaire, answers questions specific to the topic of the survey, and they’re done. Four, in a programmatic world it will help your surveys rank better with the top tier suppliers, so your overall delivery will be increased.

All of these things add up to better data AND (for the CFOs who might be reading this) lower your CPIs. Implementing these best practices may take a bit of thought and time on the front end, but I can promise you that the increase in quality and savings is more than worth the effort.