The least you can do to improve a survey

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:

  1. Goals: Establish the goals for your survey
  2. Sample: Decide who to ask and how many
  3. Questions: Test the questions
  4. Questionnaire: Build the questionnaire
  5. Fieldwork: Run the survey from invitation to follow-up
  6. Responses: Clean and analyse the data
  7. Reports: Present the results.
The seven steps of the survey process are: Goals: Establish your goals for the survey, leading to questions you need answers to Sample: Check who to ask and how many, leading to people you will invite to answer Questions: Test the questions, leading to questions people can answer Questionnaire: Build the questionnaire, leading to questions people can interact with Fieldwork: Run the survey from invitation to follow-up, leading to people who respond Responses: Clean and analyze the data, leading to answers Reports: Present the results, leading to decisions.
The survey process in seven steps

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: