Let’s be honest, we often get asked to improve a survey when we don’t have time to read an entire survey book – or even, chapter 8 in the book (“The Least You Can Do”).
So here are some downloadable resources to get you started quickly.
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:
- Goals: Establish the goals for your survey
- Sample: Decide who to ask and how many
- Questions: Test the questions
- Questionnaire: Build the questionnaire
- Fieldwork: Run the survey from invitation to follow-up
- Responses: Clean and analyse the data
- Reports: Present the results.

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 determine 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. This mean: please credit me and say where you got them from.
If you find them valuable, please consider:
- Buying my survey book from Rosenfeld Media
- Adding a review on my survey book’s page on Amazon
- Getting me to speak at one of your events
- Hiring me as a trainer or consultant