Slide show for Training events.

1. © 2014 Widgix LLC dba SurveyGizmo. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Materials are owned by Widgix LLC. Unless otherwise
specified, all materials appearing herein, including the text, logos, graphics, icons, images, as well as the selection,
assembly and arrangement thereof, are the sole property of Widgix LLC. Materials must not be copied, reproduced,
modified, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any form.

2. Surveys: What Are They?

3. • A survey is a collection of questions asked
repetitively to a sample of a population to
mathematically derive characteristics of the
total population.
Surveys: What Are They Good For?

4. Great Survey Design Cycle

5. Why is This Cycle Important?
• It’s a framework that provides guidelines
when you work with clients and stake-holders
• You’re likely doing parts of it already
• Those are likely the parts of your process that
work!

6. The Trifecta: Need, Design & Act

7. Unit 1: Need

9. Goals and Objectives

10. Needs: We All Have Them
• Questions to ask:
– What are we trying to figure out?
– What kinds of reports or data do we want or
expect?
– What will we do with this data when we’re done?
– Who is our intended audience or population?
– How are you going to access the target
audience?

11. Examples of Need
– How well known is my brand?
– Will customers buy this product?
– If we offer X benefit, will our employee happiness
go up?
– Why are my customers not converting?
– Will my product do well in a new market?

12. Set a Survey Goal
• A goal is not a single learning point – a goal is
what you plan to do with this data, and why.
– Good goal: grow your company into new
markets.
“A survey will determine which markets are
good for our existing products, so that we
may expand our customer base.”
– Bad goal: make more money for your
business.
“A survey will help us make more money.”

13. Learning Objectives
• Determine your learning objectives
– These should all support your overall need and goal
– A good amount of learning objectives: three
– You should have no more than five!

14. Brainstorm

15. Selection and Refinement

16. Eye on the Prize: ROI
• If the cost of the survey is greater than the
possible ROI, it’s a waste of time and money,
• Without an ROI measurement, there is no
encouragement to take action.
• Without clearly defined actions, survey
results may not have an ROI.

17. Unit 2: Design

19. Organize Brainstorm

20. Refine Brainstorm Ideas
into Questions

21. Guide: Writing Questions
• Multiple choice versus open-text questions
– Quantitative versus qualitative
• Phrasing and language use
– unclear language – grammar
– ambiguity – too technical
• Language can differ btw demographic groups
• Keep your questions:
– Brief – Simple
– Relevant – Specific and direct

22. Qualitative Versus Quantitative
• Quantitative – Numeric in nature,
extrapolated to whole population
• Qualitative – Touchy-feely, give context to
quantitative questions

23. The Four Horsemen of the Surveypocalypse
Eliminate Bias

24. Emotional Bias
• Asking loaded questions
• Asking neutral-seeming questions on a
loaded topic

25. Identity Bias
• Asking “Do you like SurveyGizmo?” with a
SurveyGizmo logo in the corner of the
survey
Isn’t Mel a
great trainer?

26. Option Bias
• Required, non-applicable questions
• Leading or restrictive options
• Different types of scales
• Option lists of death
? ? ?

27. Conversational Bias
• Surveys as a conversation
• Respondents giving the answer they think
you want to hear
Mr. Black
Job
Interviews
Today
Were you fired
from your last
job?

28. Lack of Focus
• Covering too many diverse topics
• Additional questions that do not meet the
survey goal
• Questions that are not inline with the
learning objectives
• Questions that do not derive actionable
results

29. Miscommunication
• Know your audience and the language that
they use and understand
– Avoid technical terms unless it is
appropriate
– Define terms if necessary
• Remember to speak in your company’s voice
• Have a peer review for clarity

30. Survey fatigue as a cultural trend
• Cultural survey fatigue
– The average
respondent is fatigued
already, just by nature
of:
• Receiving emails
from organizations
• Suggestions on
receipts and from
cashiers

31. • Try to avoid…
– Leading questions
– Loaded or suggestive questions
– Fatiguing question types – large tables,
lots of open-text or essay questions
– Sensitive questions
– Highly technical language
The Wrap-Up: Question Mistakes to Avoid

32. Re-establish Focus

33. Unit 3: Build

34. • Design: Involves
thinking about
psychology, emotions
and words. It is the
more abstract phase.
• Build: Involves taking
into account security
walls, logic, combatting
fatigue, bias, and poor
data collection; It is the
more active phase.
How are Design and Build different?

35. Stages of Build

36. Construct

37. The Radio Button
• Quantitative
– Scale (should be horizontal)
– Categorical (should be vertical)
• “All of the above” is a no-no!

38. Neutral
or not?
Scale questions: The controversy
61-6

39. The Checkbox: Choose All That Apply

40. The Checkbox: Beware!
Choosing more than one option changes
statistical reporting a lot!

41. Multi-Text Questions
• Qualitative
• Explorative or
un-aided
response; used
for lists
Please list the names of phone providers that you have seen or heard advertised.

42. Essay Questions
• Qualitative and
explorative
• This is a way to
gather unaided
responses for
your survey 3. What is your favorite thing about SurveyGizmo?

43. Table Questions
Do NOT use as a space-saver – these are fatiguing!

44. Table Questions: What’s Totally Okay

45. Build your survey.
Test It.
Get buy-in from your
stakeholders.

46. Validate
• Number, Email, Percent, Date
• RegEx – Validate patterns like phone
numbers, zip code, etc.
• Capitalize each word
• Autosuggest answers

47. Test Reports
• Are your questions reporting the way you
expect?
• Are you able to create the reports you
need using the data you are collecting?
• Is the data in the format you need?

48. Apply and Test Logic

49. Different Types of Logic
• Fatigue-fighting:
• Page jumping
• Show-when logic
• Percent branching
• Piping (repeating)
• Bias-fighting:
• Randomization
• Disqualifiers
• Survey timing/combatting straight-lining
• Vote protection

50. Perform a Pilot Study

51. Unit 4: Collect

53. Survey Mode
Mode introduces different forms of bias – so
how the data is collected is important!
Choose mode of
survey

54. Choose Sample

55. • Your options are: survey everyone, or
survey a percentage
• Why?
– Cost
– Survey fatigue
– You will miss certain sections of the
population
– Using a statistically valid sample is just
as effective (or more effective) than
trying to survey your entire population
What is Sample? Why is it Important?

56. More on Sample
A sample is statistically valid when every
single person in that population has a equal
chance or probability to be in a sample that
you select.

57. What is the Ideal Sample Size?
How many responses do you need for your
survey to be statistically accurate?
– It depends.
• How accurate do you want the data to
be? (margin of error or confidence
interval)
• How repeatable do you want the
results to be?
• How large is your total population?

58. How to Determine Sample Size
• Estimate 400 responses
• Use a sample calculator!

59. Sample Calculators: Magic?
http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

60. Caveats
#1: If you are segmenting data for comparison,
the segments should be the same as the
segments in the represented population.
#2: If you are cross-tabbing data, ensure that
the data collected (per question that you are
cross-tabbing) is statistically valid when
representing the larger population.

61. Where Do You Get Sample?
• Pull a population from your customer list.
– Warning: Do NOT use your entire
customer base.
– If everyone has the same chance of being
randomly selected, you are not biasing
your results in any way.

62. • Panel Companies: A panel company is an
organization that exists to sell anonymous
survey responses to marketers and market
researchers.
Engage Panel (opt.)

63. Panel Companies: The Issues
Drawbacks:
– Using incentives
– Cannot access market researchers
– Some panel companies will buy from each
other when they cannot provide the
sample needed
– Hard to determine level of bias in sample
• If the panel companies award “points”
for websites like Amazon – helps
reduce sample bias based on incentive

64. Incentives
• Biases your sample (ex. Toys R Us
gift card as incentive)
• Incentives can jeopardize your data
(because respondents just want to
get to the end)
• Safeguards:
– Survey page timer with
disqualification
– Shorter surveys
– Red herring questions
– Clean data (eliminating straight
liners, Christmas trees, etc)

65. Unit 5: Report

67. Clean Data

68. How to Clean Data – Step 1
• Look out for:
– Unusually quick responses
– Unusually long responses

69. How to clean data - Step 1
1. Patterns/Straightlining 2. Red herring/logically inconsistent
4. Checking all or Checking one3. Gibberish, one word, fake text

70. How to clean data - Step 2
• Prepare your data for analysis
– Beware of:
• Inconsistent numeric values (How old
are you? Etc.)
• Breaks in validation
• Do not introduce new bias!
– Changing question text

71. • Run individual reports for each learning objective.
– Use this process to determine the “highlights” of
data collected as they relate to ultimate actions
so that you can truly understand the most
significant findings of your research.
Run Initial Reports

72. Run Preliminary Reports
• Your preliminary reports should be focused on your
original learning objectives.
– Did you get your questions answered?
– Is the data in the format you expected?
– Are you seeing the trends that you anticipated?

73. Running reports: Key factors
• Make sure your data makes sense
• For any overt trends you are finding in the
data, make note of them and ensure that
they are important towards the objectives
that you had set for your survey

74. Analyze Data

75. Analyzing text responses
• How will you deal with your qualitative
data?
– Keyword frequency
– Word clouds
– Positive/negative

76. Analyzing text responses
Bucketing
– You can use the SurveyGizmo Open Text
Analysis tool.

77. Segmenting data for analysis
• Often, your survey will contain demographic
and firmographic questions to create
segments in your survey.
• These segments should remain the same
from start to finish of the survey process.

78. Good indicators of a trend:
• When you have data that isn’t statistically
sound but is still interesting, you can call it
“directional data”.
– This data gives you an idea of what your
population is saying, thinking or feeling,
but you cannot use statistics to back it up.

79. Create Final Report

80. Suggestions for effective reports
Stage 1: Write a summary
– What was the ultimate goal of this survey?
– Who was surveyed?
– Who was the population?
– Who responded?
– Include basic highlights of the survey
audience and your data to introduce the
findings

81. Stage 2: Write a mini-report for each
individual learning objective (ex: 401K
changes).
•The last section for every learning objective
report will include the recommended actions
to take based on the results of the survey
(these should not be a surprise!)
Suggestions for effective reports

82. Stage 3 (optional): Interesting and
unexpected trends found
– Good to know, not need-to-know
– Ex. Perhaps you found a new, unintended
segment of your population that could
help you to make good business
decisions moving forward
•This is going the extra mile for your clients!
Suggestions for effective reports

83. Stage 4: Conclusion
– Recap what actions are going to be taken (if
any) based on your findings.
– Get all of stakeholders to agree to those
actions.
– Create a survey to be sent to stakeholders in
order to gain feedback for the project and put
actions in motion.
– Important for the next stage, Act: ask
stakeholders to provide metrics that can be
used to measure the success of the actions
that will be taken.
Suggestions for effective reports

84. Tips for communicating data
• Try to anticipate questions about the
report
• Know the details
• Be honest

85. Unit 6: Act

87. Actions: The key to success!
• Reiterate project goals and objectives
• Motivate the stakeholders to take action
based on the data collected
• Establish a reasonable timeframe in which
actionable results (positive or negative)
can be expected.
Empower Action Taking

88. Monitor Actions

89. How to get feedback
• Send a short survey to all stakeholders
• Ask for any suggestions
• Allows you to work better together in the
next study and improve the process.
Get Feedback on Survey

90. Publish and Share Study
Results

91. Great Survey Design Cycle
© 2014 Widgix LLC dba SurveyGizmo. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Materials are owned by Widgix LLC. Unless otherwise
specified, all materials appearing herein, including the text, logos, graphics, icons, images, as well as the selection,
assembly and arrangement thereof, are the sole property of Widgix LLC. Materials must not be copied, reproduced,
modified, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any form.