Working Together to Create a Great Survey

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a novice or a seasoned professional. No matter how many surveys you have created before, there will always be times when you’re unsure about something and need to sound out your ideas with someone else before you move forward.

From questions types to your survey’s design and layout, it’s useful to be able to call on another pair of eyes to look over your surveys, its this fresh perspective which can make all the difference between success and failure.

There are many areas where collaborating with others can help you to improve your online survey. To help you we’ve outlined some of the best of these below.

How collaboration helps create great surveys

You’re able to validate your ideas with others

Sometimes we just need to sound out our approach with someone else to get to that final stage.

If you’re unsure about how you’ve worded or formatted a question, or the logic you have applied to certain areas of your survey, you might like to consider dropping some commentary into your own survey to validate your ideas.

By asking respondents queries that range from: ‘Was that a good question or could I have used an alternative question format? to ‘Did my skip logic take you to the right place? – you can gain some really valuable and interesting feedback.

To help get the answers you need, try sending a preview link to your survey to as many people as you can including colleagues, friends and family members.

If you have a SmartSurvey account, you can preview and test your survey with others in just a few simple steps. For more information on set up, why not take a look at our Previewing and Testing Surveys page.

You’re better able to fine tune your design and wording

If you’re an organisation with lots of specialist departments, being able to increase your collaboration with people that have the skills you need can get your survey on the right track much earlier.

From your graphic designers to your content writing team. Whether you’re looking to maximise the impact and respondent interest in your survey design or optimise the volume and quality of your responses with the best worded questions, you’ll want to get these specialists involved at the right stages of your survey creation. This becomes even more critical if you’re an organisation that needs to create surveys more regularly.

SmartSurvey team plans have been specifically designed to encourage greater collaboration between different departments and individuals, making working on surveys and getting their feedback easier to achieve.

From features that make it simpler to share, review and test designs, questions and surveys, to tools that allow assigned administrators to set rules where only authorised individuals can access specific areas or information. With a team plan both collaboration and data security are maximised.

To find out more about benefits of team collaboration on survey projects, why not look at our flexible multi-user and corporate options.

You’re able to speed and improve how well you can analyse your data

While collaborating with others helps you to build a more effective survey and generate a better response rate, you’ll only achieve a truly great survey, if you can effectively interpret your data findings and take meaningful actions with them as a result. Similarly, to the areas of design and content, some people will have better analytical abilities than others, so whoever these people are within your organisation, you’ll want to identify and get them involved as soon as your results start coming in.

SmartSurvey makes it easy to review and analyse data in real-time or over any time period, as well as export and share your report findings in range of different formats for deeper analysis through excel or SPSS.

We’re continually improving our reporting and analysis tools, with the latest release update that we’ve made to our Export tool a great example of this. Having designed this from the ground up, based on our customers’ feedback, we’ve made our new Export tool even more powerful, flexible and easy to use. To find out more about the benefits it’s delivering why read about our latest Export Tool Release Update.

Final Thoughts

Why you should increase collaboration

Your ability to gain valuable feedback that you’re able to take meaningful actions with ultimately relies on you generating a great survey. So, it’s essential for you to get the right people on board as early as you can and effectively collaborate with them throughout your survey’s creation, distribution, data collection, reporting and data analysis stages, if you’re to maximise your survey’s success.

When you consider that individuals who are encouraged to act more collaboratively are 64% more likely to stick to their task, as well as demonstrate higher engagement and energy levels compared to their solitary peers, increasing collaboration among your survey teams also makes good business sense.