Running Surveys: Repeat Value from Deploying the Same Survey Multiple Times

Attitudes can change rapidly. So, if you are using the data from your online survey findings to make key strategic decisions, it’s critical to ensure they accurately reflect the current views of your audience.

Whether you are asking employees about how connected they feel to your company, customers how satisfied they are with your product, or getting the views of consumers about some potential new branding you are working on; repeating the same survey at regular intervals can be extremely valuable. You will be better able to track and the gauge the happiness of your staff, immediately identify any customer satisfaction changes and get the concrete reassurance you need from consumers to move ahead with any branding changes you want to make.

When you have put the effort in to create a great survey, you will want to be able to re-use it again and again. Fortunately, there are several scenarios where this can be highly advantageous.

3 benefits of running the same survey multiple times

1) Better measure your success through benchmarking

While one person’s view of success can vary from someone else’s, there is general agreement that benchmarking gives you a baseline standard to work from, which you can use to measure your success. For online surveys, benchmarking typically involves comparing your results against the findings of other matching surveys over time. For example, this can be particularly beneficial when you are trying to evaluate the results of different strategies, such as measuring the perceptions of event attendees visiting your latest conference, compared to your first one. If you need tips on devising some good post-event questions, you might like to visit the ‘events and occasions’ section on our survey templates page, where you’ll find ready-made examples such as our conference feedback form template.

The key thing to bear in mind when you are benchmarking is consistency. For example, let’s say you created a concept testing survey to get the views of consumers on a series of brand options you were looking to introduce for a new pet food range. You may have taken the decision to repeat it following a poor initial response. In such a scenario, to ensure the clearest findings and validity of your results, you would need to ensure the sample size and demographic distribution for both surveys was as closely matched as possible.

If you are thinking about repeating your own survey but are finding it difficult to keep your demographics consistent, or simply don’t have enough similar contacts to rerun it, we can support you to reach the audience you need. More information about this is available on our consumer panels page.

2) Track attitude or perception changes

If you are not looking to speak to lots of different people but are more interested in examining the same group of people, whether that’s employees or a specific customer group to see if their opinions have changed over time, repeat surveys can also help you with this. This type of research involving repeated observations of the same variables over short or long periods of time is often referred to as a longitudinal study.

However, compared with benchmarking, when you are repeating surveys for a longitudinal study that uses the same group of people, any small discrepancies in your results will be statistically more significant and noteworthy. At this point you may want to apply filters, which can provide you with a quick and effective way to isolate parts of your data, so you can investigate them in more detail and see how they may have changed. Filtering is also useful when you want to know how a specific group of respondents answered your survey. So, whether you are looking to repeat an employee satisfaction survey, a marketing survey or a customer satisfaction survey, filtering can help you to answer any number of essential questions such as:

• How do employees in a specific department feel about my company?
• What are the preferences and characteristics of the customers who purchase our brand?
• Who are our biggest advocates – those who say they are very satisfied and likely to purchase from us again? Those who are most likely to recommend us?

If you would like to know more about filtering tools and how to apply them to your own survey reports, we’ve put together a helpful guide to assist you with this.

3) Strengthen your survey’s findings by replicating your results

Accuracy is a final reason why you might want to distribute your survey again. A scientist will typically run the same experiment several times, as they know that the ability to consistently replicate results is the strongest way to prove a theory. Similarly, if for example, you were to repeat the same survey and obtain similar findings on three separate occasions, this would be significantly more convincing than running it just once. To further strengthen your point, you may even decide to redeploy your survey at different times of the day/month/year, among different demographics and over different mediums.

Making it easy for you to repeat your survey

If you’ve made up your mind to rerun your survey, you’ll want this to be as quick and painless as possible, which is why we’ve made this simpler for you. With a visit to our copying surveys page, we’ll show you how to repeat your survey using the same layout, structure and questions that you previously used.

Whether you are looking to see if your employees still feel the same about your business following a change in company structure or check that your customers are still satisfied with a particular product; whatever your reasons, repeating your survey will put you in a much better position to take the right next step forward.